The Khmer Rouge began to purge Cambodians associated with the former government, a move that would feature mass execution.
This is commonly viewed as the beginning of the Cambodian Genocide.
The House of Representatives voted 303-96 to admit women to the previously all-male service academies. The move was quite controversial at the time.
The Senate would follow suit, with the first women entering the academies in the summer of 1976.
The final episode of the police series Adam-12 was broadcast.
The series had run for 12 years, and in many ways formed the concept for those raised in the 60s, and even the 70s, as to what being a policeman was all about. Much more gritty television police dramas, and even comedies, would come in during the 70s and change much of that view.
Chocolate Drop Hill on Okinawa was taken by U.S. troops. The final fighting was in interconnected tunnels.
The 1st Marine Division captured Wana Ridge on Okinawa. Marines also conducted mopping up operations on Horseshoe and Half Moon using flamethrowers, resulting in a desperate Japanese counterattack that ends with 200 Japanese troops killed.
The US took Malaybalay on Mindanao.
The Japanese Army evacuated Hochih, China as the Imperial Japanese General Staff decided to deploy forces closer to the Japanese Home Islands.
The Japanese had secured enormous territorial gains in China with a just completed offensive, and yet there was a massive amount of China left, the same problem the Japanese had been faced with since 1932 when they first began to fight in the country. In many ways, for the Japanese, World War Two was principally about China, and now it was faced with the reality that being tied down there was contributing enormously to its losing in the war.
The Soviets appointed Soviet authorities appointed Dr. Arthur Werner as the Oberbergermeister of the Berlin. The appointment would be shortly confirmed by the Western Allies.
He was not a Communist and had not been a Nazi. An engineer, he had lost his teaching position in 1942.
It seems fairly clear that the Council convened on this day, and that Emperor Constantine arrived to observe, not to participate, fourteen days later. He had sought the council, however, given the Arian Heresy, which had an extremely widespread following in the Church.
The president of the council seems to have been Hosius of Cordova, assisted by the pope’s legates, Victor and Vincentius.
The creed:
I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins
and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead
Just remember this, if you wait until 67 fra (full retirement age), the money you gave up between the age of 62 and 67 won’t be made up until you are around age 81. So hopefully by the time you break even at age 81 you can still enjoy your life and that is if you are even still alive. I’m starting mine at 62
From a Reddit thread.
I figure there's pretty much no way I'm going to be living when I'm 81.
Occasionally I'll ask readers questions here. Very rarely to they respond, and I don't blame them, which doesn't keep me from doing it anyhow.
For my retired readers, what age did you retire at, and why?
I'll be 62 in less than a week. I'm tired, and had two bouts with my health after a lifetime of being mostly healthy. I have one kid in grad school for two more years and my wife of 30 years is ten years younger than me.
I'm struggling with what to do. If it was just me, there's no question what I'd do. This week I'd send around the announcement that I'm planning to retire. It'd still take me a year or two to extract myself.
I've brought on a new employee recently to help me. As I wasn't planning on retiring, even though I'd like to, that employee has no concept that I might be soon. Indeed, the new employee just left the employment of somebody who did retire at age 67.
But I've also seen something recently where I've reencountered somebody I haven't professionally for probably fifteen or twenty years. I'll mention more of this in a thread to come, but I can tell that person isn't firing on all their cylinders anymore, and yet there they are, working full time. . .when they shouldn't be.
Anyhow, if you have an opinion, or experience, I'd be curious what it is.
Executive Order 11860—Establishing the President's Advisory Committee on Refugees
May 19, 1975
Since the arrival of the first settlers on our eastern seaboard nearly 400 years ago, America has been a refuge for victims of persecution, intolerance and privation from around the world. Tide after tide of immigrants has settled here and each group has enriched cur heritage and added to our well-being as a nation.
For many residents of Southeast Asia who stood by America as an ally and who have lost their homeland in the tragic developments of the past few weeks, America offers a last, best hope upon which they can build new lives. We are a big country and their numbers are proportionately small. We must open our doors and our hearts.
The arrival of thousands of refugees, mostly children, will require many adjustments on their part and considerable assistance on ours. But it is in our best interest as well as theirs to make this transition as gracious and efficient as humanly possible.
I have determined that it would be in the public interest to establish an advisory committee to the President on the resettlement in the United States of refugees from Indochina.
Now, THEREFORE, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and statutes of the United States, and as President of the United States, it is ordered as follows:
SECTION 1. Establishment of a Presidential Advisory Committee. There is hereby established the President's Advisory Committee on Refugees, hereinafter referred to as the Committee. The Committee shall be composed of such citizens from private life as the President may, from time to time, appoint. The President shall designate one member of the Committee to serve as chairman.
SEC. 2. Functions of the Advisory Committee. The Committee shall advise the President and the heads of appropriate Federal agencies concerning the expeditious and coordinated resettlement of refugees from Southeast Asia. The Committee shall include in its advice, consideration of the following areas:
(a) Health and environmental matters related to resettlement;
(b) the interrelationship of the governmental and volunteer roles in the resettlement;
(c) educational and cultural adjustments required by these efforts;
(d) the general well-being of resettled refugees and their families in their new American communities; and
(e) such other related concerns as the President may, from time to time, specify.
The Committee shall also seek to facilitate the location, solicitation, and channeling of private resources for these resettlement efforts, and to establish lines of communication with all concerned governmental agencies, relevant voluntary agencies, the Vietnamese-American community and the American public at large. The Committee shall conclude its work within one year.
SEC. 3. Assistance, Cooperation, and Expenses.
(a) All executive departments and agencies of the Federal government, to the extent permitted by law, are directed to cooperate with the Committee and to furnish such information, facilities, funds, and assistance as the Committee may require.
(b) No member of the Committee shall receive compensation from the United States by reason of service on the Committee, but may, to the extent permitted by law, be allowed travel expenses, including per diem in lieu of subsistence, as authorized by law (5 U.S.C. 5703).
SEC. 4. Federal Advisory Committee Act. Notwithstanding the provisions of any other Executive order, the functions of the President under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (5 U.S.C. App. 1), except that of reporting annually to Congress, which are applicable to the advisory committee established by this Order, shall be performed by the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.
The Czechoslovak Extraordinary People's Court distributed over twenty thousand sentences - seven percent of them being for life or the death sentence - to "traitors, collaborators and fascist elements."
Philipp Bouhler, age 45, Nazi official and philosopher committed suicide with a cyanide capsule while in a U.S. internment camp.
French troops landed in Syria and Lebanon to reassert control over the region. The landings sparked protests from Arab nationalists.
This is the birthday of Malcolm Little, known to history as Malcolm X.
I've discussed him to some extent here on this blog before, but I had neglected to enter him as a topic category until today. An extremely intelligent man and the son of a Baptist lay minister, he had undergone a continuing religious evolution and was a Muslim at the time of his murder. I suspect that, had he lived, he would have returned to Christianity.
It is also the birthday of Pol Pot
Pol Pot has featured on this blog a lot recently. Born Saloth Sâr the Cambodian Communist leader would go down in history as one of the greatest mass murderers of all time. Quite well educated, he became a Communist while studying in France after World War Two. He died in exile in 1998.
The views of average Wyomingites, by a huge margin, are clear on public lands. We want them to remain public.
And yet our Congressman voted to transfer 500,000 of FEderal land in Arizona and Utah over to private hands. It's clear that at least one of our Senators is okay with doing something similar in Teton County.
Wyomingites aren't in favor of this at all. Indeed, one of the most rabid Trumpites I know actually expressed bewildered opposition to this.
So here's the problem, and the question.
Why are Wyomingites still supporting the people who support this?
Politics are varied and complicated. The reasons that Wyoming has gone so far to the right in its recent politics are as well. A lot of it has to do with social issues, abortion, transgenderism, immigration, and so on, and much of that, here, has to do with the death of the Democratic Party and there being, seemingly, no where else to go.
But at least on the local level there certainly is, and what Wyomingites are presently doing is not in their own best interest.
Much of what they're currently doing is, frankly, based on a host of lies. Donald Trump was not the victim of a stolen election with Joe Biden won. Joe Biden won. Global warming is not a fib. The long drift away from coal cannot be arrested. The state's petroleum industry was never under any governmental assault (leases went up under Biden). There is no war on the West. The region's agricultural sector isn't under governmental attack, but rather under real estate developer attack. The Democrats really weren't advancing gun control.
But we've been bought off on a bunch of dramatic assertions designed to cause the rise up of what plaintiff's lawyers call our "lizard brain".
Well, now we have a whole host of legislators, many from out of state, who don't share local values at all, and a Congressional delegation that is more interested in supporting the agenda of the far right and its ostensible leader, a nearly 79 year old real estate developer suffering from dementia, than paying attention to what we actually believe.
And that's because that's exactly what we let them do.
In reality, those close to the inside know that John Barrasso doesn't believe what he's supporting. It's pretty clear from her past that Cynthia Lummis doesn't either. Harriet Hageman, well she probably does, as she's a political family that has always had this set of views. Having said that, and importantly, she intends to run for Governor next election and Chuck Gray, who is a Californian with very little connection to Wyoming, will run for House.
In the next election Wyomingites have a chance to make their views known, although they really need to start doing so right now. That can have an impact. John Barrasso, in the last election, adopted a whole host of new views he probably doesn't hold at all to hold off an attack from his right. Lummis just quietly mostly didn't say what her views actually are the last time she ran, which she could do under the circumstances, and which leaves her room to maneuver.
Maneuvering will, it must be noted, need to occur. In 2026 the House is going to be Democratic and the MAGA reign will be over, save for in Wyoming, where there's every reason to belive it will keep on keeping on.
The Wyoming Freedom Caucus of its day, the Johnson County invaders.
Much of this, we'd note, is perfectly consistent with Wyoming's history. Early on Wyoming sent a solidly Republican group of legislatures to our solon in Cheyenne in spite of its association with large outside agricultural interest which were oppressing local interest. That didn't end until the invasion of Johnson County in 1892 which briefly swept the Republicans out of power, and brought Democrats into the legislature and which sent Governor Barber packing, although not until after he tried to actually remain as Governor a la Trump insurrection in a way. That event, however, shows the electorate can react. It also shows us that politicians can too, as Francis E. Warren managed to survive the event, career entact, when really she shouldn't have, by changing views.
And this is happening in Montana, which was a little in advance of Wyoming in tilting to the far right, right now.
Just sitting and complaining "well that's not what we think" won't get much done.
Politicians from any party ought to represent the views of their state. They ought to also intelligently lead. There's not much intelligence being manifested in the populist far right, which is mostly acting with a primitive response on a set of social issues combined with false beliefs, andy in Wyoming, with views they brought up from their own states which don't have much to do with us here. We aren't Sweet Home Alabama.
But that won't happen unless Wyomingites educate themselves as to the truth, and what is truly going on, and how they're simply being fed raw meat for the dogs. Until that occurs, we're going to go further into the abyss.
This is probably a coincidence. This particular church has an associate pastor who is from Vietnam. Indeed, he's the second Vietnamese priest to serve in the parish. But this particular Mass comes up just after the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.
Prior to the Vietnam War, very view Vietnamese lived anywhere other than Vietnam. Some lived in France, due to the French colonial association with the country. When the French Indochinese War ended, some Vietnamese in fact relocated to France, with a small number of actually being Vietnamese who were in the French armed forces. It wasn't a large number, however, like it would come to be with Algerians.
The end of the Vietnam War however was different.
Many Vietnamese fled because they legitimately feared Communism, putting the lie to the often stated proposition that the South Vietnamese didn't really care how the war ended. Thousands did, and of those who did, most didn't make it out of Vietnam.
Over 2,000,000 Vietnamese now live in the US, with 60% of those having been born in Vietnam. 37% of them report themselves as being Buddhist, 36% Christian and 23% aren’t affiliated with any religion. Vietnamese Americans are more than three times as likely as Asian Americans overall to identify as Buddhist (37% vs. 11%), but with Buddhism being the "native" religion of the country in American eyes, that numbers if surprisingly low.
Indeed, it gives some credibility to Dr. Geoffrey Shaw's assertion in his biography of murdered South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm that at the time of the his assassination Buddhism was in significant decline.
However it would also reflect that the American understanding isn't really all that correct. While some regard Christianity as "introduced", the fact is that Buddhism is as a well, with it being Indian in origin. Vietnam also has a folk religion which shares many common elements of other Asian "folk" religions, including devotion to ancestors.
Today in Vietnam Buddhists make a 13.3% of the total population, and Christians a declared 7.6% with 6.6% being Catholic. Hoahao Buddhists make up 1.4%, Caodaism followers 1% and followers of other religions including Hinduism, Islam, and the Baháʼí Faith, representing less than 0.2% of the population. Folk religion has experienced a revival since the 1980s, and it's widely believed that the official 7.6% of the population being Christian is in error, and actually over 10% of the population is Catholic. The Catholic faith in Vietnam is so vibrant that it now supplies Priests to the United States, as the nation has a surplus of Priests itself. Looked at this way, Buddhists and Christians are overrepresented in the United States in comparison to Vietnam, but it might actually present a more accurate make up of the Vietnamese religious makeup.
Or perhaps not. One of the groups that most feared a Communist takeover in Vietnam were Catholics, and for good reasons. Catholicism has always been antithetical to Communism and in many instances it was credited with being the only effective force on the Globe opposing it. Elsewhere in the same general region of the world, some credibly credit the CAtholic Church for preventing mid 20th Century Australia from falling into Communism, something the far left in that country still strongly resents. Catholics were well represented in the South Vietnamese government and military, and interestingly some of the leaders of its military converted to teh Faith during the war or even after it.
Buddhism was introduced to Vietnam in the 2nd or 3d centuries BC, so its presence there is very old. Christianity in Vietnam is mostly the story of Catholicism there, and was introduced by the Portuguese, not the French as is so commonly assumed. Vietnam was never part of the Portuguese Empire, but its influence was very long, and very significant. The Vietnamese alphabet was developed by the Portuguese.
The Communist Vietnamese government has always been hostile to religion in general and openly repressive against some. Catholic have notably been oppressed, and the native Cao Đài religion, which originated as late as 1926, was oppressed by both the Republic of Vietnam and Communist Vietnam.
France did of course have all sorts of influences on Vietnam due to its conquest of Indochina which commenced in 1858 and ran to 1885. The very first Vietnamese refugees I met in the US spoke French as well and their native language, reflecting that they had been educated during the French colonial period. Today that number has dropped way off, with their being no need for French in daily life. A much higher percentage of Vietnamese in Vietnam speak English today than French. One of the very first refugees I met, who had been an engineer in Vietnam, but who worked as a city mechanic in the US, struggled with English, but spoke French fluently.
At one time the Vietnamese Diaspora retained a close cultural connection with the defeated Republic of Vietnam and in some places, they still do. Republic of Vietnam flags were prominent in some locations this past month in areas with large Vietnamese populations and they were displayed during commemorations of the fall of Saigon. However, there are a not insignificant number of Vietnamese now who are post war immigrants, and whose association is not as strong or there at all. The Republic of Vietnam itself is officially detested in Vietnam, and often open views about the Republic reflect the same.
Vietnamese in the US often express the hope that someday the separated people can be united somehow, something that's common for diaspora people. But it won't come to be so. As time moves on, the Vietnamese in the US will become more and more American, like Italian Americans are and Irish Americans, and less Vietnamese. Part of that will occur through intermarriage, which is occuring in the US but which interestingly was not a common occurrence during the French occupation of Vietnam or the Vietnam War, with the cultural differences at the time simply being to vast for it to arise frequently.
" Five East Massachusetts boys set up an 81mm mortar. Front row, left to right: Pfc. Albert Bartolussi, 56 Dow St., Framingham; S/Sgt. Louis Zompa, 211 Elm Street, Lawrence; rear row, left to right: Armand Lesage Jr., 24 Mason Street, Lawrence; Cpl. Roger L. Leavitt, 113 Franklin Street, Lynn; and Pfc. Leopold Freda, 221 Cheslsea Street, East Boston. They are all fighting with the 306th Regiment, 77th Infantry Division. Okinawa. 18 May, 1945. 306th Infantry Regiment, 77th Infantry Division. Photographer: Roberts, 1st Information and Historical Service"
The U.S. Army took Sugar Loaf Hill on Okinawa.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced the deportation of Fritz Julius Kuhn of the German American Bund to Germany. His citizenship had been revoked in 1943. His family had already been repatriated, during the war, to Germany.
The entire series of events would crush him. He sought to return to t he US without success. He was arrested and tired by the post war German government. He died in 1951 a broken figure.
The Chinese Army reoccupies Foochow.
Karl Karl Dönitz issues a statement expressing horror at the Holocaust and distancing the German military from it.
Yeah. . . whatever.
William Joseph Simmons, founder of the second KKK, died at age 65.
Irish Prime Minister Eamon De Velera, announces a $12 million food and clothing aid program for Europe.
