bongozap

I was hoping you would go the other way and hope that the caliber of Politicians improves over time.

My mom is good friends with another Hanoi Hilton prisoner, Al Stafford. He was the subject of a book called Bouncing Back, which was very good. In the book, they describe how they occupied their time and how they bounced back afterwards.

Stafford himself said one of the other prisoners taught him Spanish while he taught the other guy how to sail - all through "tap code" between cells.

I find that pretty amazing.

Do you keep in contact with any of your fellow prisoners?

It's certainly hard to gauge other peoples experience through your own, but reverted contributions is a widespread complaint from a lot of people.

A lot of academics and experts reject Wikipedia because they've observed that contributions from legitimate experts are often reverted in favor of contributions from editors who feel some sort of ownership over the article.

My own frustration is in seeing plainly wrong information and then looking in the history to see that the information persists because some relentlessly dogged editor is focused on their very narrow interpretation of a minor point of both facts and policy.

I still like wikipedia, and use it for a variety of things, but I don't take anything at face value. I try to verify from the citations and other sources.

Here's a little bit about the book that tells a little more detail: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/geoffrey-norman-3/bouncing-back-how-a-heroic-band-of-pows-survive/.

Relevant quote: "Stafford and several others set up a ""college"" and taught classes--entirely from memory--in such subjects an animal husbandry, higher math, auto mechanics, Spanish, and literature; one POW even taught wine appreciation."

It's been a long time since I read the book, so I may have conflated some elements. It seems it may not have been all through tap code, all though the tap codes was certainly a big part of the story.

Because they're afraid that if they do that, they won't get "access."