Hey there, Garrison and Tink 💕😽 Not sure where the week has gone, but gone it is. And so here we are on another CATURDAY, the last of April. How is this possible?? Once I let the moggies out, I’ll sit for a while in your Coffee Shop before heading bedward. No better place to be ….

Very nice, Garrison. Oh my, THE BUTTERFLY !

Afternoon Dear Garrison and Tink

Cloudy here today, but no rain in many weeks. Love the Checker cab in the video. My dad had one for years – what a work horse!

Found another old pic of you, Nim.

ouch

Thank You Rah.

Thanks Rah,

I have been trying to grasp the absurdity of being bogged down in a massive war that you are not winning and deciding the answer is to broaden the war to fight many more countries. Japan and China and 1941.

There was an absolute belief that they would crush their new opponents. But at the same time a determination that if they didn’t, they would force the enemy to break himself upon their defenses and give up.

They had complete fore knowledge of our massive prewar Navy building plan. Yamamoto predicted that they could run amok for 6 months. Midway was June of 1942. He also predicted that after 2 years he could make no promises. By November 1943, our fleet was big enough that we could invade Tarawa. Both predictions were extremely accurate. But he was criticized for making such defeatist statements. By the Marianas, we had 15 carriers to their 9. And it quickly got worse.

And the rest of the Navy knew it as well. Achieving victory after victory and going home to protect the fleet. Leaving before the job is finished. They kept their fleet preserved as much as possible. But by the time they were ready to commit, they were massively outnumbered. But to win, they would need repeated miraculous one sided victories as we keep building new ships.

Yes, the belief that Americans were weak was ingrained. Similarly the belief that they were superior was absolute. Completely racist, worse than our racist views of them. Those two things underlay all their bad plans.

Yet the military leadership never waivered. They were like a bad backgammon player desperately trying to ‘win’ by repeatedly doubling down. At the end they were preparing a fourth of their population to attack with farm tools and were quite willing to let another 1/4 die of starvation, just so long as we would be forced to sue for peace, allowing them to keep everything they still held.

And as the video hints, their propaganda never changed. Still firmly committed to their superiority and our inferiority. Even as the poor soldiers came to realize it wasn’t so, the belief was ingrained in the leadership. Anything that questioned it was ostracized as defeatism.

And suicide was built into their plans from the start. Those ten minisubmariners at Pearl were on a suicide mission. And after Guadalcanal, all island defenses could not be supported when under attack. Hence each island defense was a suicide mission. Knowing that, they strove to learn how to make each Japanese suicide more costly to America. Eventually they devolved to flinging ships and aircraft and yes soldiers in suicide attacks. But the idea was built in to the philosophy.

Oddly enough, we confuse Bansai attacks with suicide attacks. I am glad there were different words as the documentary pointed out. A Bansai attack was a demonstration of superior military spirit to break inferior military spirits. But it was also a tactic of feudal warfare which could not work against artillery and machineguns. Even as defenses devolved to suicide attacks, Bansai became a way of showing you could be beaten, but your military spirit was still unbroken. Going out in a blaze of glory.

Going back to Pearl, there is much more. Ever since the Meiji Restoration, Japan was trying to demonstrate its superiority by winning the Empire Game of Colonialism. All of Asia and the Pacific was “theirs” to colonize, even Australia. When they doubled down, they went big. And they laid the groundwork for that in 1940 with Greater East Asian Coprosperity Sphere.

I am confused about the need to attack America. They could have taken all the European territories and had all the resources they needed. They had spent decades planning to start a war in the Pacific with an invasion of the Philippines and a fleet designed to crush our fleet when we came to the rescue. Also, you have to include the unmentionable knowledge that our navy would be too big for that by the end of 1943 in their calculation. And the Philippines were positioned perfectly to keep those resources away from Japan if we did go to war.

But I have no idea how Roosevelt could have motivated us to go to war against Japan when we weren’t attacked and he really wanted us to go to war against Hitler.

And doubling down is better than the shame of surrender.

I also find the run up to the war to be hard to fathom. Commodore Perry showed the Shogun as weak. Hence Meiji restored the rule of the Emperor. And ended the Samurai class but tried to modernize Japan by extending Samurai sensibilities to the people who used to be peasants. By 1930, the military was trying to become the next Shogun. Thus Manchuria, and China were wars started by mutiny and used to gain power for the military. But Pearl had the Emperor’s approval.

Also, there were small wars between Japan mutineers and the USSR in 1938 & 1939. If Japan had won, that part of Asia could have been the near term focus of Japan’s war. But they lost. And it disappears down the memory hole. It also helped Stalin unite with Hitler to start the war in Poland. Then when Hitler turned on Stalin, he learned that he no longer needed to defend against Japan and rushed those troops to defend Moscow. Yet at the end, the Japanese were relying on their neutrality pact with their enemy Stalin, whom they knew was going to break the pact, to negotiate for peace instead of surrender.

Much of this thinking is just too strange to accept and comprehend. So thanks. Every little bit helps

Thanks for posting, rah. I’m reminded of an early childhood experience. I remember I was still quite small. My dad was talking to a neighbor—a former PT boat squadron chief. He was telling my dad about the Guadalcanal battles.

The Japanese were sending destroyers and cruisers down “the slot” to bombard the airfield captured by the Marines. He described sending his wooden torpedo boats out every night to oppose the more formidable Japanese naval ships. Although lightly armed (20mm and 50cal) plus torpedos, the PT’s could count on their 42 knot speed. Japanese destroyers with 6 5in twin mount guns could make up to 38knots and so were also enormously potent vessels.

I remember my neighbor describing the small PTs going out to battle night after night. Much later, reading the histories, I remembered that long ago childhood conversation . . . and better understood just what our guys were up against.

This was a challenge to hear because it’s sad! ALL these people, dead, in one way or another. The Adversary was hard at work.
Thank you for posting.
And now…
We Thank The LORD for sunshine today.
Continued BLESSINGS of healing!

thx to rah and greg1 for the video and analysis

Glad you’ve recovered that much.

It helps to be able to return to doing things…..it helps to be able to have a sense of normalcy.

Watching others do things you normally could drove me nuts. Watching some things fall apart because I could not manage them drove me nuts.

The more you do the more you CAN do over time.

It is good you had people you can count on during your down time.

Go slow enough to fully heal and enjoy the rewards of improving.

It matters.

Hope you continue to improve.

Adore mowing, especially, when laundry going, dishwasher going, something cooking in the oven.

A friend’s mom, still mowing at age 91. Darn, some girls ruin it for all of us. Had been feeling rather butch, until that revelation.

I push mow, one day. Riding mow front of property another day. Last day in cycle, riding mow back of property at pond.

Needing rain badly, first real chance this evening. Middle rural Georgia.

Huge oak limb fell this week, burn pile was already too impressivel.

Good news, rah. Goon on ‘ya!! 🙂

Here is for Sunday:

Thanks rah. I am right on the edge of the slight and enhanced area. Will be keeping my weather radio close.

25 April 2007 Bobby “Boris” Pickett, American singer-songwriter (“Monster Mash”), dies from leukemia at 69

Monster Mash

Here is an oldie….”a beautiful bunch of ripe banana….hide the deadly black tarantula….” nope, am now up for the day…imagining that arachnoid…..

This tune was a favorite of ours, back in the day…

I recall a better ‘tongue roll’ on the words “drink of rum”…. I have my mom’s 33 1/3 album…but its warped and I no longer have a functional phonograph….

That celsius caused me a lot of mathematical grief, as mathematically challenged student nurse…just saying…

I will leave the “Apothecary System”, for another day…

Thanks for posting Alan Hunt’s “cats”!!!! Met him at an art show in the 90’s… have a few of his cat prints…

Asked if he would do one of my precious calico cat…He replied that he only did ‘big cats’. He was very nice and easy to talk with…thank you again for sharing these.

Good afternoon Mo Peace. Wonderful paintings of the big cats. Wonderful scriptures to go with them. Thank you for all your work finding these different artists. I may not always reply, but your efforts are greatly appreciated.

Hope you and yours have a most blessed and wonderful weekend.

These things happen. Politically powerful men take advantage of vulnerable women. It happens a lot here people are poor or have limited options — very concentrated power. Every big institution has this issue. The question is what the young naive ell-meaning do-gooder does when they receive the report, follow or mess up ‘procedure’ and the predictable catastrophic events happen to the whistleblower.

David Horowtiz referred a nice bookkeeper to some black folks who were apparently trying to ‘help’ — called the Black Panthers. After she found, er, irregularities in the disbursement of federal funds she as killed. Horowitz spent the rest of his life trying to get her justice and expose the serious corruption on the Left. He did not shrug it off, and move into a comfy well-paid Beltway job.