I'm fully aware of all the arguments for and against deploying the atomic bomb in Aug 1945 exactly as was done, but putting that aside, the fact that Truman was completely personally unaffected by all the civilian lives that were annihilated is fairly despicable.

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I'm sympathetic to that, but the history is more complicated than it might first look. I would listen to this about it, maybe you can find it for free somewhere.

https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-42-blitz-logical-insanity/

Wild because it made me respect Truman a lot less.

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A myth that originated from bad, cliche WWII movies perhaps?

Historical criticism duly noted, but the article was nonetheless interesting; thanks for bringing it to light. Like the movie in the title, fighting sports touch something visceral that's missing in our modern, soft civilization. It's also why so many westerners pursue Asian martial arts.

Rome was excellent at logistics

Its certainly easy to imagine how outbreaks could be facilitated in starving populations.

Oppenheimer was right to make the bomb, it was a race to ensure the Nazis didn’t get it first. The atom bomb ushered in a new world order which has so far prevented the extreme deaths and horrors of WWI and WWII by giving saber rattling idiots a reason to avoid out right war. As scary as those weapons are, MAD is a legitimate reason for peace. Children were being indiscriminately killed all over the world as a result of the war for at least 9 years, ending WWII without a US invasion of Japan was a blessing despite the terrible way it was accomplished. I get the “US bad, anything they do is bad” modern filter, but your take is missing quite a bit of nuance here.

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It's a bit over-sensationalized in the article.

The part of Israel's history that gets tagged with ???s mostly concerns the period before the burning of the first temple in 586. From 586 onward, Israel's history is fairly well attested and can be cross-referenced.

What's generally questioned is the depiction of the kingdoms of David and Solomon as very powerful and influential states, mostly because you'd think if they were the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Hittites would have mentioned them and the archeological record doesn't support such a state existing. There is at best 2 or 3 references to Judah in their records despite them talking about this region a lot. It was a really important region for the big empires of the age.

But there's been growing evidence for years, sporadic as it is, for an proto-state Judah. The Tel Dan Stele sure seems to reference a 'House of David.'* It's generally speaking, taken for granted that Judah existed before 586, existed for a good while, and was possibly/probably a regional power. What's questioned is if it was really as strong a kingdom as the Bible suggests it is cause we'd expect to see evidence for such a state where we're not finding it.

Put another way, it's not really a question of whether the Kings of Judah existed or not. It's mostly a question of if the Bible is an accurate record of their history. There's no real reason to doubt these men existed. We accept king's lists at face value all the time. There's contradictory evidence though as to how powerful and important these kings were regionally and in the broader political network of the Near East of the ancient world before 586.

As the OP article suggests, this discovery is mostly about chronology, which is a very fucky and hard to detail subject because until people started recording dates it can be really hard to gauge when things happened in relation to other things. We have to fallback heavily on things like wood rings, geological events, and cross references to try and nail down the timeline of human history before the 6-5th century BCE.

This find is cool because it purportedly has a date (said because this will be investigated and confirmed) which is a pretty big find. Biblical Scholars have argued for a long time that parts of the Bible come from now lost royal records, and old stone carvings are useful for supporting that especially if their old. I do note however that the OP article fails to explain how these inscriptions were dated.

Their having a date isn't the same thing as being written on that date (the oldest date given in the Maya world is hundreds of years before the inscription itself was chiseled). They kind of skip over that in this article and simply claim the age of the inscriptions.

*(there are people who question the translation but they're more and more a minority and alternative translations have not been convincing)

This story made me really respect Truman. Though both him and Oppenheimer have a point.

Fascinating thought! That might help explain why Indian statuary looks somewhat more western than its Chinese equivalent.

Well, it was Truman who said "The buck stops here."

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Man I thought it was a poem I didn't think about it making sense lol I'm just saying how I read it in a literal sense. I didn't interpret it as "first, then"

I rearranged to make the grammar clearer. Like, what's doing the piercing in that sentence? It's April, not the drought of March.

There was a Crusade in the Netherlands from 1228 until 1232.

Sounds very similar to what was at the barrier islands of North Carolina. That area is referred to as "The Graveyard of the Atlantic." It's the area that the Labrador Current and the Gulf Current intersect, building up sandbars and such.

Much of the housing (and economy really) originated by materials from the frequent shipwrecks, and they had rescue stations all along the coast with some very brave people who made frequent and extraordinary rescues of ship crews.

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Over about 3000 years Sumerian cuneiform was used (at least)

• by the Sumerians of course, a language not related to any other as far as we can tell.

• Then Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, those 3 are semitic languages.

• Also used for Elamite, another contemporary language not related to anything.

Hittite, an indoeuropean language. Again completely different from all the others.

Urartian, which I can't recall right now what it is related to but it's not semitic

and finally, heavily adapted, Old Persian, another indoeuropean language.

Also Eblaite, Hurrian, Luwian which are related to the ones already mentioned and a few more where we have very little texts remaining.

I read this as, "When April with its showers sweet, the drought of March has pierced to the roots."

That's only the beginning. Over about 3000 years Sumerian cuneiform was used (at least) by the Sumerians of course, a language not related to any other as far as we can tell. Then Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, those 3 are semitic languages.

Also used for Elamite, another contemporary language not related to anything.

Hittite, an indoeuropean language. Again completely different from all the others.

Urartian, which I can't recall right now what it is related to but it's not semitic

and finally, heavily adapted, Old Persian, another indoeuropean language.

And it's not trivial to just use Cuneiform for a different language as the "letters" don't fit the sounds. For example it's a pain to map cuneiform symbols to Hittite sounds and uncertainties remain in transcribing and translating the texts.

What's more, we can only read, translate and even to an extent speak those millenia old languages because the writing was used so long and was still used for languages where we have modern descendants and/or texts in different scripts and alphabets like the Rosetta stone or the Darius inscriptions.