Comments by "Colonel K" (@Paladin1873) on "Today I Found Out" channel.

  1. I remember the original pizza bomber story when it hit the news, but I never learned of the aftermath until now. Thanks for giving us the rest of the story.
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  2. When I was a teenager in the 1970s I knew five boys who were caught in a field just as a thunderstorm brewed up. This was in north Florida where such storms were quite common. Most kids were taught not to seek shelter under any tall object such as a tree or barn, but these boys decided to run into an old two story tobacco barn that was nearby. While inside with the doors open, they were struck by lightning which knocked them all down, but only four of them got back up. The fifth boy was dead. I later spoke with one of the survivors who was a friend of mine and he described the event as involving a massive blast of air and a large round fireball which streaked through the barn. I don't recall him mentioning any smell, but after watching this video I wonder if it might have been ball lightning.
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  3. If memory serves me correctly, the British government got wind of the operation and changed the appearance of their pound notes to thwart the Nazis. The most famous German agent, Cicero, was paid off in these fake notes. Now do a video on the American plan to flood Japan with poisonous snakes dropped by air. This is not to be confused with the far more practical and imminent plan of dropping bats armed with small incendiaries (negated by the use of the A-bomb).
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  4. The Iliad is the most tedious and repetitious story I have ever read. I'm thankful we have English translations with punctuation instead of the original Greek without any punctuation. Yikes!
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  5.  @MrS22222  Yes, it's the same effect one gets from motion sickness.
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  6. I think James Bond would have been sending short messages on a lengthy notice.
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  7.  @Morgan_Sandoval  You know nothing about me, but your comment speaks volumes about you.
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  8.  @Morgan_Sandoval  That would depend on what you consider equality. I believe in equality of opportunity where individual rights are concerned. From what I have seen of progressive equality, it is both a subversion and perversion of this idea. Your comments fit right in with this modern progressive attitude. Attack anyone you think opposes your worldview. Never engage them in intelligent debate. If this is to be your chosen path in life, I suggest you buy a flashlight. It will be a very dark journey.
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  9. I'm surprised politicians don't suffer from it, considering how often they eat their own.
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  10.  @stacyrussell460  Good point.
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  11. Even though they mean the same thing chronologically, BC predates the more politically correct BCE. Now let the hate flow.
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  12.  @micfail2  In a perfect world the criminal would compensate his victims, but this rarely happens. That's why we need laws to protect property owners, especially when their own insurance companies won't compensate them. The government has to assume some responsibility for its actions. It could be a law requiring the government to reimburse the property owner for anything not covered by his insurance company. The government could reserve the right to sue the criminal to recover those expense. The courts might even be allowed to extend the sentence of the criminal if he is unable or unwilling to pay the fine. This was done in the past with mixed results, so I would not hold out much hope of success. The current situation is untenable, for it absolves the government of any responsibility.
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  13.  Juanito G  Like so many expressions, the meaning of the prhase may have only a nominal relationship to fact. Napoleon was about average height for a peasant of his time, but he was considered short for an aristocrat. Today we might say somebody is overcompensating for a perceived shortcoming (no pun intended).
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  14. "The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left."           Ecclesiastes 10:2 (NIV)
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  15.  @erebostd  I think you are treating unrelated events as being equivalent. They are not. There was never a policy of native genocide in America. The tragedy of the American Indian was the result of two centuries of ad hoc policies, not some master plan. Though there were voices in both government and the general public who endorsed organized genocide, it was never a popular idea, nor was such a plan ever adopted. The dropping of the Atom Bombs was a strategic decision that hastened the end of WWII. In so doing, "The Bomb" saved far more lives than it cost. You can question the wisdom and effectiveness of large-scale bombing of cities, but it makes no sense to treat Hiroshima and Nagasaki separately from those earlier raids over Poland, England, China, Germany, and Japan. Sometimes mass destruction worked, sometime it did not. Any killing of noncombatants is regrettable, even tragic, but it is often unavoidable in war. It's the motives that matter. There is a clear distinction between killing people to end a war and killing them because you don't like the color of their skin, their religion, their form of government, or because you covet their land and resources, or wish to enslave them. I'm not convinced the world is an evil place, but I am convinced there are evil forms of government and some "well intentioned" people in and out of government who endorse terrible ideas. In the recorded history of the world it is governments that have ended more lives and enslaved more people than the collective acts of all individuals acting on their own. Neither is acceptable, and I agree with you that we must work every day to make the world a better place. It is an unending goal.
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  16.  @HalfdeadRider  I prefer to use the correct acronym and pronounce it "Feebie".
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  17.  @sarpbakrsoy8125  I'm reminded of a line from Audie Murphy's bio-movie, "To Hell and Back", when his best friend sarcastically remarks to him in the middle of combat with the Germans that “they can kill us, but they can’t eat us – that’s against the law”. Apparently some Japanese soldiers broke this law. Perhaps some Ustasha did as well.
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  18. Take heart, Simon; I may have still a fairly decent head of hair topside, but I've never been able to grow an awesome beard like yours to save my life.
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  19. I take offense at that :)
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  20. That was one helluva Christmas story. From now on I'll stick to Ralphie, Rudolph, Peanuts, and the Grinch.
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  21.  @joesterling4299  As a teenager my great-grandfather came from Germany (The German Confederation) to America at the end of the American Civil War (aka, the War for States Rights, the War of Northern Aggression, The Late Unpleasantness, The War of Secession, The War Between the States). During the period Reconstruction he started out as a riverboat peddler. One day, while waiting for a stagecoach, he overheard a young girl singing in German. Her family had come over from Prussia to start a new life in Georgia. In 1880 he married this now adult woman and they went on to have eight children, including my grandmother. This just goes to show you there is such a thing as a German love story, even halfway round the world.
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  22.  @jeanlessard8800  Rubish.
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  23.  @jeanlessard8800  Gee, I didn't know my extended family owned and controlled Hollywood. Oh, by the way, we're of German extraction as well. So Hollywood never presents a positive depiction of Germans thanks to the "Jewish community"? I presume you have never heard of "Schindler's List" which was made by Hollywood's most famous living producer, Steven Spielberg, whose family is Orthodox Jews. If you want to bash the majority of Hollywood elitists for their left to far left ideologies, I might agree with you. That is easily verifiable by their words and deeds. But attacking Hollywood, especially in today's anti-Israeli environment, for being anti-German or controlled by a Jewish cabal, means you have suspended critical thinking in favor of personal animosity. You really should stop lumping everyone into groups you can like or despise, and try treating each of them as individuals that you like or despise.
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  24.  @oslonorway547  No, he was in Pilsen as part of Patton's Third Army.
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  25. No wonder they weren't worried about mercury poisoning killing them; they were more likely to die from tuberculous long before then.
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  26.  @susim4503  Can you be more specific? Do you want weather that makes for abundant rain, abundant food? If so, what kind of food? Which part of the globe do you want to benefit from this weather? The whole world cannot benefit from warmer or colder weather, only parts of it can.
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  27.  @IvanBaturaChannel  Why do you say that?
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  28. Pick your patrons carefully.
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  29. ​ @jasholden9741  It used to be common practice to reward certain O6 and flag level officers with promotion to the next grade upon their retirements if they held Regular commissions and met certain other requirements. Whatever the case was back then, officers who held Reserve commissions were not afforded this opportunity. Since Jimmy Stewart held a Reserve commission, he would not have been eligible for a retirement promotion. I do not believe retirement promotions of this kind are authorized anymore. At least I do not recall ever witnessing one during my career. There are exceptions for enlisted members and officers who previously held higher ranks and satisfied at least 10 years of Reserve or Active Duty commissioned service and the necessary time-in-grade requirement for the most senior rank held. Such members can petition for a promotion even after they retire. I personally knew one retired Army E9, who much later had his rank upgraded to O4 (Major) because of his prior commissioned served in the Army Reserve. Don't ask me how it's done; it's too convoluted for me to understand, much less explain.
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  30. Fate is no respecter of heroes.
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  31. Why do fat chance and thin chance mean the same thing?
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  32. You'll have to ask Milton Berle.
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  33.  @chopinbloc  I agree. I used to work on a flight line where that was mandatory.
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  34. I think you've been misled about Bat Masterson's revenge killing of his brother Ed's murderer. He did fire on two men, wounding both, one of the mortally, but the rest of the story appears to be the fiction of some writer's imagination.
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  35. Curses, foiled again.
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  36.  @choughed3072  Yes, bloodhound evidence has long been accepted in US courts. There's even an old episode of Perry Mason where he discusses this very point.
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  37.  @Morgan_Sandoval  Now let me see if I've got this straight. You make up your mind in advance what you think of people before you engage them in debate. If you decide you don't think you will like a person's argument, you make a straw man of him, then knock him down in order to justify in your mind your decision not to debate. This is circular reasoning at its finest, but it isn't intelligent discourse.
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  38.  @Morgan_Sandoval  I did not open the discussion. Mine was the fourth comment. You then attacked me. Why? What is it that angered you so much?
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  39.  @nrsrymj  There is a flaw in your reasoning. Equality of opportunity does not coerce people to pay for other people's wants. It requires no action by anyone. It is the same with all the rights mentioned in the Constitution. You have the right of free speech; you do not have the right to be free from speech or to suppress the speech of others. But free speech only works when people behave ethically. Otherwise, anyone screaming profanities at your child or lying in court would be protected under the guise of free speech. In this regard we are all equally protected under the Constitution. You speak of healthcare and free education for all without examining what this entails. Both of these ideas involve coercive and overt action by government to force some people to pay for the benefit of other people. How is this freedom? Government decides what quality of service you receive. There is no freedom of choice or opportunity; there is no freedom at all. "Free for all" in these cases really means free for some; everyone else pays double. If you truly believe this is fair and just behavior, then you shouldn't mind if the cashier at Burger King charges you $100 for your next meal because he determined the previous ten customers warranted free food. It is an unworkable scheme that only guarantees that those who suffer most under this form of tyranny become even less productive and more disenchanted.
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  40.  @nrsrymj  The Founders were wise enough to realize the purpose of government was to preserve out liberties. The rest was up to us. Healthcare and education are not rights under the US Constitution. They did not fall under the purview of the federal government. They were the responsibility of state and local governments, which acted on them as each state saw fit. At best they are privileges, for nobody has the right to be healthy or educated (anymore than there is a right to deny the same), but almost everyone has the desire to be healthy, and many also desire to be educated. It costs money to do both. The states found it to be in their best interest to provide basic education to children, then later on they determined it desirable to have some form of higher education. Private schools and colleges predated them, but not everyone had access to them. State and local taxes made these educational opportunities possible. Public healthcare followed a similar path and coexisted with private care. As for federal taxation, it was authorized but very limited in scope, and its purpose was to pay for the basic functions of government. That worked well until progressives (that is what men like Wilson called themselves) saw an opportunity to greatly expand the power and reach of government. Once armed with the power to tax and spend as much as it liked, our federal government has been on an ever increasing trajectory to do just that. Free education and healthcare for all are chimeras offered by a government indifferent to the reality that we cannot afford the cost.
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  41.  Florian Held  Then it is apparent you know nothing about fascism. If you think I am a fascist, you are even more mistaken. Fascists advocate totalitarian rule and centralized control, both of which I find highly anathema. They have far more in common with communism than with our republican form of democracy.
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  42.  @nrsrymj  You are confusing rights with responsibilities. The Constitution recognizes preexisting individual rights, but it also describes the responsibilities and limits of the federal government and says that all other authority is retained by the states and the people. Common defense is not a right, but a responsibility of federal government that is authorized by the Constitution. There are no rights or responsibilities to education and healthcare in the Constitution. The federal government has no business in these areas. They fall under the province of the states. The whole idea of federalism is the division of responsibilities between federal, state, and local government. The progressive movement since the 19th century has been one long and largely successful attempt to pervert the Constitution and centralize power in the federal govenrment at the expense of the states and the people. One of the great disadvantages of this approach is that a one-size-fits-all mentally results. Under federalism the states are free to experiment with different ideas, to discard those that do not work, and serve as examples to other states when something does work. Another advantage is if you are not happy with the laws in your state and you have not been successful in changing them, you can always move to another state that more closely represents your views. This is not possible when the states reduced to being no more that organs of the federal government.
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  43.  Florian Held  Listen to yourself, Florian. You sound just like them. By the way, my father's side of the family escaped the Nazis, so stop your ranting.
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  44.  Florian Held  And who determines what constitutes the greater good? Good for thee but not for me? I am always wary of what people with a bit of power are capable of doing in the name of the greater good. It's why I do not blindly trust any large enterprise, be it government, business, or labor. To quote the late philosopher Eric Hoffer, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket. And those who benefit in the racket will defend it with passion.”
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  45.  Florian Held  At last we find some common ground. Yes, I've read Rand and agree with much of what she said about individualism and selfishness. She was being brutally honest, but she meant it in the context of honoring one's commitments and being ethical in all dealings with others. This applies to all parties. When one party violates an agreement, the other party is no longer obligated to honor it. I detest the word capitalism, which was derived from Karl Marx's writings. History has proven just how wrong Marx was. Free enterprise and free trade are what I believe in, not crony capitalism, mercantilism, monopolies, or cartels. They are perversions of the idea, largely because they favor one group over another. A level playing field is the last thing their supporters intend. What makes you think people today are any more selfish, greedy, and indifferent than at any other time in history, and why focus your comment only on Americans? The primary difference I see between Americans and the rest of the world is that we enjoy a greater degree of freedom and independence. For it to continue, it is necessary for people to act in a morally responsible way. John Adams warned us of this when he said "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other". So in a sense you are correct. We risk becoming our own worst enemy. As to your last statement, you'll have to clarify it for me. I didn't quite understand what you meant to say.
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  46. Didn't Ayn Rand base her character, Howard Rourke, on Wright?
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  47. Winnie the Pooh must be healthy as hell.
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  48. Let's categorize countries as comfortable, tolerable, uncomfortable, and shit hole.
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  49. It's pronounced K-C one thirty-five.
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  50. Any chance they'll write one in poop?
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