Eat Your Boogers

The Summer Olympics start tonight. That means TV will be filled with lame ceremonies and singing and dancing tonight. Even after the ceremonies, though, I've never been really big on the Summer Olympics; I'm more of a winter sport kind of guy. The diving is impressive, and the gymnastics, and I do enjoy watching the boating events sometimes, but there's not much appealing to me to watch people run in circles or swim back and forth or lift a lot of weights. It's just not exciting. Maybe if they had real sword fighting I'd have something to get excited about, but fencing isn't real sword fighting. Combine the scarcity of interesting events with the crap China's been pulling, and I've decided I'm not even going to watch at all. The 2010 Winter Olympics should be fun, though, and maybe since they'll be in nearby Canadia, I just might be able to attend in person. That would be cool, since I missed the Olympics in Utah because I was busy serving a mission in Washington.

A couple nights ago a comment I made about the bombing of Hiroshima sparked the weirdest debate I've ever had with a liberal. It's too bad it didn't happen here on this blog, but I'll post a link, anyway. It happened in the off-topic forum of an online game I occasionally play, called Vendetta Online (yes, I'm enough of a nerd that I comment on a video game's discussion board). The particular discussion thread was a guy asking for advice on what to put on his custom license plate. It was a boring discussion until I joked that my 16mpg Jeep Cherokee should have a license plate that said GASGZLR, at which point a discussion began on the effect of rising gas prices. The oddness started when a commenter who goes by the online name SuperMegaMynt stated that "it is not the gun, nor the missile, nor the atomic bomb which is the cause of the fiercest wars; it is the vehicle. That is the only true weapon of mass destruction."

I assumed he was talking about global warming, but it turns out he had an odd idea about fuel, but his statement was confusing. What followed was the most bizarre debate against the most nonsense argument I've heard in a long time, that weapon delivery systems are more dangerous than the weapons they deliver, and that the definition of death is merely being permanently immobilized. There's too much debate to just post here, but if you are interested it starts with this post and continues through to the end of the thread. My Hiroshima comment comes a few posts down, where I link to my blog post from Wednesday. It's very interesting (to me, at least), and I even interject some Tolkien and The Dark Knight. It's actually some of the best debating I've done; too bad it's against such moronic arguments.

In other news, I am nearly immune to all diseases. This is not the same as being immune to nearly all diseases. I do get sick, but I tend to be mildly irritated by illnesses that completely immobilize those around me. For example, this past week my wife has been nearly knocked flat by a very bad cold (though she's tough, so she was able to work and function despite looking deathly ill). I suffered no effects whatsoever until yesterday, as she was getting over it, when I woke up with a dry, scratchy throat and had a runny nose all day. I've all but cleared up already. An even more extreme example comes from my mission, when my missionary companion was bed-ridden for ten days because of the flu. To be perfectly honest, this guy was a wimp, but it makes the contrast even better. Until the very last day he was sick, all I suffered was extreme cabin fever until I finally caught it and felt slightly nauseous for one day.

How do I stay so healthy? What is the secret of my near immunity? I eat my boogers*. According to an Austrian doctor, eating your boogers provides a boost to your immune system similar to a vaccine:

"With the finger you can get to places you just can't reach with a handkerchief, keeping your nose far cleaner. And eating the dry remains of what you pull out is a great way of strengthening the body's immune system." He then added, "Medically it makes great sense and is a perfectly natural thing to do. In terms of the immune system the nose is a filter in which a great deal of bacteria are collected, and when this mixture arrives in the intestines it works just like a medicine."

"Modern medicine is constantly trying to do the same thing through far more complicated methods, people who pick their nose and eat it get a natural boost to their immune system for free."

Now you know my terrible secret. They're actually quite tasty (unless you spend too much time near, say, a cattle ranch, or a wastewater treatment plant). If you want to stay healthy, eat your boogers!

*I don't really eat my boogers, I'm just naturally tough apparently.

Peace through Superior Firepower

Today marks the 63rd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan in World War II. Before I go on, I don't want anyone reading this to think I'm cheering the deaths of Japanese soldiers and civilians, rather I'm celebrating the positive consequences of the only two nuclear bombs ever to be used in a war; specifically the consequence of securing an unconditional surrender from the Emperor of Japan, resulting in millions of innocent lives being saved.

Wait, one of the most horrible bombings in history saved lives? What if we'd just laid down our arms, isn't it U.S. aggression that causes all the trouble in the world? I mean, if we would just leave the rest of the world alone, they'd leave us alone! There must have been a diplomatic alternative.

Diplomacy only works if you have might on your side. Might doesn't make right, as some people say, but if you are on the side of right, you have the responsibility to do all in your power to see that right prevails. If we had decided not to drop nuclear bombs, would the Japanese or Germans have had any such scruples to keep them from nuking the U.S.? Now that we've won, we know that neither power was as close to developing the bomb as we had thought, but they were working on it, and it was in their interest to make us believe they were close. Both Germany and Japan were bent on conquering the world, and the unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor was intended to keep the U.S. out of the way, since we would eventually have been compelled to join the war at some point anyway.

Weren't the Japanese ready to surrender before we nuked them, though? Well, yes, but any surrender other than unconditional surrender is unacceptable. Had we accepted surrender conditions favorable to Japan, it would only have been a matter of time before they gathered their strength and renewed their military campaign, and all the while innocent civilians would have continued to die in China. Aside from that, the Japanese government was not unified in discussing surrender, with most officials hoping the war would last until the U.S. was forced to invade Japan on the ground, and that they could inflict enough casualties to come to a settlement favorable to Japan. Germany and Japan are no longer threats to the world because we and our allies completely destroyed their ability to wage war on the world. Now our relations with these two countries are no worse than our relations with, say, france (the ungrateful nation whose butts we saved. Sarkozy understands, at least.) or Spain. Japan and Germany are the nations they are today because we completely broke them, then helped them to rebuild. No other nation in the world does that*.

But just like Afghanistan and Iraq, they were only protesting American Imperialist Capitalism! America tortures people and kills innocent civilians! Well, in war, civilians die. If you refuse to accept civilian casualties, you will lose the war, and the world is a better place because Hitler and Hirohito were not on the winning side. It is actually an amazing thing, maybe miraculous, that we do win wars while doing all we can to avoid unnecessary civilian deaths. Guess who was going after civilian deaths deliberately? The Holocaust was bad enough, but Japanese atrocities in China were even worse. The two atomic bombs we dropped did kill thousands of civilians, but they saved millions of lives over all. As horrible as the bomb was, it was the morally right but very difficult decision to use it.

The bushido warrior code was deeply ingrained into the Japanese soldiers, who were trained to die rather than surrender. Most Japanese soldiers preferred to take their own life rather than be taken prisoner. Additionally, the Japanese were engaged in total war, with all civilians, women and children alike, participating in the war effort in some way, and they were determined to fight to the end no matter the cost.

"The entire public, in effect, became subject to call-up under the Volunteer Enlistment Law, which applied to all men ages 15 to 60 and all women ages 17 to 40.... What this sea of civilians lacked besides training were arms and even uniforms. A mobilized high-school girl, Yukiko Kasai, found herself issued an awl and told: 'Even killing just one American soldier will do. You must prepare to use the awls for self-defense. You must aim at the enemy's abdomen.' Many civilians found themselves drilling with sharpened staves or spears. Japan lacked the cloth to put those civilians into uniforms -- one senior general spoke of his hope to provide them with patches on their civilian clothes. This lack of distinguishing identification would undoubtedly have made it impossible at normal combat range for a soldier or Marine to identify which civilians represented the Japanese armed forces and which did not, a sure prescription for vast numbers of deaths. At least one Fifth Air Force intelligence officer took the Japanese at their publicly broadcast word of total mobilization and declared in a July 21 report, 'The entire population of Japan is a proper Military Target...THERE ARE NO CIVILIANS IN JAPAN."

(Richard B. Frank; Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire)

The Japanese planned to fight a major battle on the mainland, prepared to suffer tremendous losses under the premise that American morale couldn't stand up to such heavy losses (a similar strategy to the guerilla tactics employed by terrorists in Iraq, hoping that mounting losses will prompt us to pull out of the war). Dropping the bombs, with the promise of more to come, prevented this, saving tens of thousands of American lives and millions of Japanese lives. Estimates run from 400,000 to 800,000 American deaths, and five to ten million Japanese deaths from a mainland invasion, compared to an upper estimate of 200,000 killed between the two atomic bombs. The Japanese also threatened to kill all POWs if the mainland were invaded.

That's just in Japan; as I mentioned before, the Japanese military was committing atrocities in China that out Hitlered Hitler. There were of course the Bataan and Sandakan Death Marches, which resulted in over 10,000 deaths, but that is nothing compared to what was done to civilians. The Japanese routinely murdered Chinese civilians, including women and children (if you want pictures, they're on the internet and in books, I won't post them here).

"For China alone, depending upon what number one chooses for overall Chinese casualties, in each of the ninety-seven months between July 1937 and August 1945, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 persons perished, the vast majority of them noncombatants. For the other Asians alone, the average probably ranged in the tens of thousands per month, but the actual numbers were almost certainly greater in 1945, notably due to the mass death in a famine in Vietnam. Newman concluded that each month that the war continued in 1945 would have produced the deaths of 'upwards of 250,000 people, mostly Asian but some Westerners.' What is clear beyond dispute is that the minimum plausible range for deaths of Asian noncombatants each month in 1945 was over 100,000 and more probably reached or even exceeded 250,000. Any moral assessment of how the Pacific war did or could have ended must consider the fate of these Asian noncombatants and the POWs."

(Richard B. Frank; Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire)

Of course, the personal reason I have for being glad of these bombs is that had we invaded the mainland, possibly the entire Marine Corps. including my grandfather would have been lost. Japan forced the end of the war to play out as it did, with their total war tactics, and it is good that we had a president with the courage to make such a difficult decision. The revisionist historians say the bombs were immoral and unnecessary; I disagree. I do, however, think it's good that none since has ever been used aggressively.

Incidentally, August 6th is also International Friendship Day.

*For a hilarious story related to this fact, read "The Mouse that Roared." It's short, and very good.