Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
You asked for more face time with The Founders®, and here it is: our first Question Time show of 2020 (there will be more!). We cover some Ricochet history, get into a feisty debate about abortion, take a brief break with Henry Olsen, host of our new Horse Race podcast to make some hay (see what we did there?) on impeachment and some key Senate races. Also, Lileks opines on the new Star Trek series, and the hosts pick a historical moment they’d like to visit once we achieve a critical mass of members (what are YOU waiting for? Join today!).
Thanks for all the great questions, Ricochet members!
Music from this week’s show: Happy Feet by The Manhattan Rythm Kings
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But how would that demonstration have worked exactly?
I suppose they could have sent Hirohito a letter:
“Dear Mr. Hirohito.
Next Tuesday at 9:30 AM sharp, we’d like to show you a little something. Please go out into your garden and face south. A plane will be flying by in the distance. We suggest you wear sunglasses.
Sincerely,
Doug
P.S. No fair trying to shoot the plane down!
It was still a better choice for him than spending a winter in the Overlook Hotel up in Colorado….
It’s much more due to two factors: one, the vast majority of our listeners are not members. Two, the vast majority of our listeners consume the shows on mobile devices, usually while doing something else (driving, walking the dog, household chores, etc.). It’s a big ask to expect people to come back here after the fact and comment.
We always include links back to the Ricochet post in the text that podcast apps display, but I suspect most listeners never see that.
We’re not changing the name of the site and there is zero evidence that it’s an issue with anyone.
I didn’t mean “an issue” that it causes people to listen but not join, or whatever, because the name is actually somehow off-putting. But if you accept that the vast majority of casual listeners will never bother to join, then obviously you need to get a lot more total listeners, so that even the fraction of those who join will “balance the books” and then some. A catchier name could help with that.
I can understand never changing, for various practical reasons. But Ricochet could still have been an unfortunate choice.
In my youth, I remember seeing a magazine that I think was distributed free, called The Plain Truth. I doubt anyone would have bothered to even give it a second look if it had been called Some Opinions.
In the “Pearls Before Swine” comic strip, the evil cable company is called Bombast Cable. Now there’s a name!
The other thing is, buying stock certificates is good for one year. What about next year, and the year after?
Except for the podcast you are currently commenting on, the name doesn’t come into play on any of our other shows. It’s a non-issue.
Not for individual podcasts, I meant for the whole site.
I have had the privilege of exploring all four of those rather remote battlefields and their various memorials. Particularly unforgettable are the “suicide cliffs” of Saipan, where parents threw their children to their deaths before jumping themselves. They had been assured by their leaders that the Americans would eat them all.
For a fascinating, detailed look at the last 24 hours of the war from the Japanese perspective, there’s Japan’s Longest Day by The Pacific War Research Society, a Japanese group which devoted eight years to researching the struggle “to confront surrender–or annihilation” and published a definitive and engrossing book about it. [Perhaps it is a good model, @Peter Robinson, for a short book about the historic happenings of a single day.] It makes clear that many in the halls of Japanese power were prepared to take the entire country and everyone in it down in flames.
“The sacred honor of Japan and her Imperial Army would then remain unstained by surrender. Only death could cancel defeat; only more death could appease the souls of the already dead.”
If Japanese leaders and commanders were seriously plotting to kill their own emperor and believed all their troops and citizens should fight to the death rather than surrender, how lucky that our parents and grandparents were serving under a Commander in Chief who had served in the trenches of WWI and knew from experience the importance and value of taking care of his troops.
Hey, Class C stock! And then Class D!
I was responding to this:
Doesn’t matter. We’re not changing name.
I will know that we are truly arrived when I google “Ricochet” and we are the first choice, and not a wrestler, a 1991 film, or the definition of the word “ricochet.”
I believe google takes “donations” for that.
The definition is Google’s standard response to searching for one word. Nothing we can do about that. The wrestler is also a standard Google “feature” that favors often searched celebrities. In my results, we’re number 3, which I think is pretty good, considering we have never paid Google for search results placement.
IMG_0609
Now you have my curiosity up. This is from the Blue Yeti’s Ricochet’s account. I note a bell shaped icon, with the number 18. What does that stand for?
Also, what does “IMG” stand for?
IMG is a link to a video file (doesn’t work right from mobile @max) but you can click on it to see my search results. Not sure what you mean by the bell icon.
You may have to refresh to get the whole video again.
P.S. In the podcast, you said you didn’t read that review.
And it doesn’t matter how many subroutines were added to the Doctor’s program, it’s still just a simulation.
I’m not a huge fan of Truman, but I have to defend him for ending WWII asap and I blame the Japanese themselves for making it necessary to use atomic bombs.
In the case of China in WWII, I think it’s unfair to blame Truman for much since he didn’t become President until April, 1945. By then the China-Burma-India theater had already reached stalemate, Japan was being carpet bombed from new bases established in the Marianas, and the Battle of Okinawa had begun. General Stilwell’s efforts in CBI had been frustrated for years by Chiang Kai-shek, Communists and other Chinese, British, and US commanders, and by FDR, who had already recalled and replaced Stilwell from his command in China in October, 1944.
But I agree it was a messy powder keg after the war and the Democrats had no one else to blame for follow-on consequences.
Edit: @Taras. I see now that I completely misread your paragraph on Truman in China and we are in agreement.
@roblong came up with those two alternatives (a thong and commando) a little too quickly, don’t you think? Hehe . . .
http://www.printingstockcertificatesfortheRicochetstore.com . . .
It’s clear James still uses a Harry’s razor on his legs . . .
Very true. OTOH, even if they knew we only had one more, they were smart enough to know we could make more. It would only be a matter of time as we kept them contained on their mainland . . .
Speak for yourself . . .
If it ever happened, I can picture @bossmongo looking at the stock and saying, “I’d tap that.”
There was an alternate history trilogy I read a few years ago that I found fun. It started in 2025 with a carrier group, led by the USS Hillary Clinton, that had a research vessel perform an experiment that sent the group back in time to the battle of Midway. The varieties of the accident caused one ship to reappear somewhere on land allowing the Soviets to find it, along with the tech and history. (This caused people to be purged earlier.)
The race for the bomb is faster now. The Soviets let the cat out of the bag, striking a site in Poland in 1944, because the US was building a stockpile first. Then FDR authorizes a fleet of B-52s to strike Berlin with three weapons.
That sounds interesting. The name of the book?
Given Hillary’s general competence in handling health care reform, foreign policy, or any other thing the Smartest Woman in the History of the Universe was tasked to do on the national stage, having the USS Hillary Clinton end up on dry land somewhere in Siberia or the Ural Mountains would be kind of appropriate…
It’s the Axis of Time series by John Birmingham. I liked little things like how the future people are oh so progressive with integrated troops and female commanders while at the same time are repulsed by the prevalence of smoking and are oppressive trying to ban it around them.
Alas it wasn’t the carrier that ended up on land. One of the destroyers or cruisers that was on the edge of the effect bubble from the research vessel.
Too bad. It would have made a perfect allegory. But was history at least set back negatively by actions initiated on board the USS Hillary Clinton? That would make the ship into the Sister Edith Keeler of the story….
The first thing I look at when I log in to Ricochet is the podcast comments.