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Fuller stood naked in the middle of the room, his soaked clothes in a pile on the floor at his feet. The wooden parts of the house creaked and groaned against the wind. A candle on the desk across the room fluttered […]

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I’ve always admired people who can successfully navigate what I refer to as “Kafka’s Castle,” a term of dread for the many government and corporate agencies that have an inordinate amount of power over our permanent records, and that seem as inscrutable and chillingly absurd as the labyrinth the character K navigates in Kafka’s last allegorical novel.

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This abandoned radar site is slowly being taken back by the jungle, its mission cut short by the end of the Cold War.

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Bulletin of Mathematical Biology - Because of the “all-or-none” character of nervous activity, neural events and the relations among them can be treated by means of propositional logic....

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The world's most powerful spies dosing each other.

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Kit and Greg Porter arrived on Rota September 4, 1967 and began teaching English at Rota School the next day. The audio is from Kit. Following is what Greg...

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Today on PELELIU - Battle of Peleliu

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We go back to Guadalcanal 7 decades after the first big battle between Japan and the allies. Master storyteller John Innes -- who lived on Guadalcanal for ma...

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Below is a conversation I had with OpenAI’s GPT-3’s language model. I gave GPT-3 the role of “Wise Being.” All of the regular text is…

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In Papua New Guinea, a journalist investigates the controversy over a World War II bomber

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Steve made his way through the party to a hallway at the back of the room, picking up two small candle lanterns from the floor and handing one to Tess. “Watch your step.” Steve held his low to illuminate the way.

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Remembering the economist who helped put the CNMI on the map Let’s go back to 1970 in the Northern Mariana Islands. The self-governing Commonwealth o

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Mar 27, 2017 - Spanish ring, sixteenth century. Colombian Emerald and gold.

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"What we deny as a culture of materialist, positivist, reductionists is the presence of spirit." Terence McKenna talks about the denial of purpose in our sci...

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Nauru - An Island Country in South Pacific is in news for the bad living conditions in its Refugee Detention centers. The Island is also known for its high r...

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(2018). The archaeology of World War II karst defences in the Pacific. Journal of Conflict Archaeology: Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 198-222.

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At first look the island of Saipan is a tropical paradise: white sand beaches, palm trees billowing in the breeze, glimmering turquoise sea, dramatic rock cliffs rising from the mist and foam of crashing waves, reefs teeming with wildly hued fish, snorkelers, and scuba divers. Saipan is also the name of a small city beside the sea that is the capital of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. In the late 1990s this remote out-post of America, 9,000 miles across the Pacific from California, offered a vision of what the nation might look like if Tom DeLay had his deregulatory way. DeLay’s adventure in Saipan illustrates how his agenda had changed: from trying to disable the EPA to imposing his ideology and will on whole territories and economies. And the implementation of his ideas would increase the riches of the loyalists who in turn keep the maw of his political leviathan stuffed with money. Here was a land newly born to American dominion, a place and people that had never been corrupted by federal regulation. Saipan was his grand experiment—a construction of the world as he wished it to be. “It is a perfect Petri dish of capitalism,” DeLay enthused in 1997. “It’s like my Galapagos Island.” The free-market laboratory experiment and the opportunities of vast profit could be carried out in virtual secrecy. Few Americans born after World War II are aware that Saipan exists. If you surf the Internet for references, you are most often rewarded with obituaries of old Marines. In mid-1944 Saipan, which rises from the Pacific near Guam, became a crucial objective in America’s tortuous strategy of island-hopping toward fortress Japan. When Saipan fell, the U.S. would be positioned to build an airfield on nearby Tinian from which the decisive bombing missions of the war were flown. But the strategic victory did not come easily; Marines speak of Saipan with the same reverence and horror they attach to Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal. The U.S. military committed 70,000 troops to overwhelm a forty-seven-square-mile island. The GIs suffered nearly 17,000 casualties during the twenty-five-day battle, including 3,225 killed in action. The slaughter of the Japanese on Saipan was almost unimaginable. The recorded total of their soldiers killed was 23,811—five hundred per square mile. And, though estimates vary, up to 18,000 civilians jumped to their deaths from the towering cliffs, rather than give up to the advancing Marines. The mass suicide convinced the U.S. military that the Japanese would never surrender to invaders of their homeland: Saipan moved Harry Truman toward his decision to drop the atomic bomb.

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We stood watching, puzzled as the guide hacked a small wedge out of a section of Bamboo. The finished product looked like a giant flute, which he then stood on end and filled with river water. A candle fastened to the end of another six foot branch was lit and extended to the small opening, sending an ear-splitting blast echoing through the hills. The bamboo cannon, he explained, is how the poorly equipped Karen guerillas create the illusion of size and strength. The Karen National Liberation Army, engaged in a forty-year-old war for independence from Burma, uses tactics such as this to avoid direct engagement with the massive and well-armed forces of the repressive SLORC regime.

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“My understanding from my old folks, who were working for the military, was that this was all an operation of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA,” Ben says, “and I think at that time, back in the 50’s, they were planning to train a lot of the South Koreans and some Chinese for guerilla warfare back in either China or Korea." “Those were the years of the CIA operations out here, from the ‘50s,” Scott confirms. “Nobody here knows much about it, but the islands were being used as training bases for covert operations by Chinese nationals, and they were also operating in Tibet. The NTTU, Naval Technical Training Unit, was the front for the CIA. “The problem was that about half of the village at that time was covered by a military installation and so they lived side by side with this military base--and not very happily. There were major modifications. There was a big fuel tank farm to the south. They dug out big soil revetments and they built oil and gasoline storage tanks. "If you look at the old air photos from the '50s and '60s, you’ll still see them there. There may still be a few out there."

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CNMI will resettle island U.S. military wants for training

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Ringing the Bell of Peace at Sugar King Park Saipan In Saipan, I took a little tour around Sugar King Park, They had an old Steam engine train, Japanese reli...

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Watch in HD!!! On August 1, 2014, during the first day of the Wilcox Family reunion in Kauai that I attended, my aunt along with some cousins got to organize...

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Surviving Japanese troops are holed up in a fortified position on the southern cliffs of Tinian. Aware of the dangers they pose, U.S. navy ships pound them w...

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CriticalPast is an archive of historic footage. The vintage footage in this video has been uploaded for research purposes, and is presented in unedited form....

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Today we look deeper into numbers stations, specifically HM01; a broadcast out of Cuba used for spy networks to communicate. I used videos from these cool gu...

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Simon stood naked in the middle of the room, his clothes in a soaked pile on the floor. The house creaked and groaned against the wind, howling and whistling through every gap and hole. A candle on the desk across the room sputtered, trying to stay alive. Tugging at the wire from under the window to the tree just outside where he had tied one end of it tightly to the highest branch he could reach. He pulled in as much slack as he could and nailed down the the last corner of the plywood to the window frame. It was quieter now. The flame returned upright and wobbled.

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Some of the men bristled at the arrangement. This was to save them all from enemy fire? The canine was a ruined show dog. To make matters worse, the platoon’s backup was a German shepherd who months before had been roaming the streets of the Bronx with the three boys who owned him. The company commander didn’t like the setup one bit. They had to make it to the junction of the Piva and Numa-Numa Trails as fast as possible, all while chaperoning a cadre of untested dogs into combat. But the commander had his orders. He motioned for the quiet, red-headed private in charge of the canine scout, PFC Robert E. Lansley from the 1st Marine War Dog Platoon, to take his position on point with the Doberman, named Andy, in the lead. At the rear, PFC Rufus Mayo, an Alabama boy who raised hunting dogs before the war, took the shepherd, named Caesar, on a leash. Since walkie talkies weren’t working well in the dense vegetation and phone lines couldn’t be strung until the area was secure, Caesar would, theoretically, serve as their lifeline, running messages hidden in a little metal pipe secured around his neck to regimental headquarters. That is, if he could find his way back, avoid sniper fire, and keep himself from chasing a wild pig off into the bush. As they moved up the trail following the Piva River, they heard gunfire and artillery in the distance as the rest of the Second Marine Raider Battalion fought to secure the shores of Empress Augusta Bay. It was the beginning of the assault on Bougainville, a speck of land among the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. Allied forces needed to capture a safe zone large enough to build an airfield that could handle fighter escorts and light bombers for an eventual attack on the nearby island of New Britain, the final Japanese stronghold in the region. From there, the effort to subdue Rabaul, Japan’s equivalent of Pearl Harbor, would begin in earnest, allowing Allied forces to hop from island to island and get within bombing range of Japan itself. The campaign in the Pacific depended on the Allies in Bougainville. For the Marines marching blindly into the dense, enemy-occupied jungle, the future depended on dogs who were never supposed to have been part of the war in the first place.

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