Trump now in 4th place with millennials

Nobody much thought the Americans would bomb Nagasaki. Not even after they'd crisped Hiroshima. The Americans. Because Nagasaki, it was even less a "military" target, than had been Hiroshima. And, it was hard to fly the airplanes in there. Finally, also, there were all those Catholics, in the city. For more than 400 years, Nagasaki, it had been the principal redoubt, in Japan, of the alien faith of Catholicism. The place, it was veritably crawling, with Catholics. And, it was presumed, the Americans, they would be more averse, to frying co-religionists, than those Japanese adhering to their own, native, heathenist faiths.

The first problem with these assumptions, is that, there in 1945, many of the Americans, they regarded Catholicism as a faith every bit as strange and dangerous and deranged, as Shinto or Buddhism, or whatever heathenism it was the Japanese were always on about.

Less than 20 years before, Al Smith, candidate for US president, he had been beaten like a gong by Herbert Hoover, not least because so many of the Americans believed that Smith, as a Catholic, once in the Oval Office, he would immediately deliver the keys to the American kingdom unto the Vatican, which would then commence to forcibly seed the land with popery, and from sea to shining sea.

Four years before that, Smith had been blocked from receiving the nomination by members of his own party, the Democrats, as convention delegates from the Southern states, many literally members of the Ku Klux Klan, declared they'd be damned, if they would surrender the party to a man in thrall to the Whore Of Babylon, united with Jews, Freemasons, and—yea, verily—Satan hisself, in a fiendish plot to destroy everything White and Right, in Amurica.

Nagasaki was actually more or less founded as a Catholic city, by a daimyo who'd gone over to the Western weirdness, not so long after white people had first bulled their way into Japan, back in the mid-1500s.

With the bullers, came their priests. Who hopped around the islands like fleas. The various head-cutters then vying for power in Japan, they vacillated in their treatment of these pests: sometimes they were given free rein, sometimes they were crucified. Eventually it was decided some of the white people, and some of their pestiferous priests, could remain in Japan—but only stuffed into a couple remote holes, one of which was Nagasaki.

By the time August 9, 1945, rolled around, the Urakami district of Nagasaki, it had been considered the "heart and soul" of Japanese Catholicism, and, indeed, of Catholicism throughout the Far East, since the sixteenth century.

And that district, it was ground zero, for the Americans' atomic bomb.

The Americans. They blew it all. Away.

Greetings, non-sports fans! I care not at all about competition and exerting oneself. That's not fun, especially in the heat of summer! So let's grab an icy cold drink and do the opposite of Olympics.

But first, The Recommendations:

August 8 is the 220th day of the year. There are 145 days left.

Today's number is eight

14%

Another week flew by. The Olympics started and Brazil (Brasil) pays a heavy price. Here they are in the midst of a coup by an oligarchy that can't even cheat their way to the presidency, so they just out right steal it. Public servants doing without pay to prop up the extensive costs of the games including security that abuses them. Then there's Turkey and Russia are joining forces after the coup, as we escalate attacks in Libya.

Welcome to Openly Eccentric where I don't have a standard opening line and I like it that way.

So, first up looking forward to the 2nd Portland Meetup at the Lucky Lab. If you missed the last one, it was a blast. See you all on 8/20 at Noon, and if you need further details, the announcement is right here!

Finding a job was hard enough for people with disabilities even before our current economic cluster. Now, with more and more jobs requiring drivers' licenses and the ability to travel to multiple locations, it's damn near impossible to find any employment whatsoever.