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๐ 60% of medal of honor recipients are Irish or Irish-American
The following is a list of Irish-American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who were awarded the American military's highest decorationย โ the Medal of Honor. The Medal of Honor is bestowed "for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life, above and beyond the call of duty, in actual combat against an armed enemy force." The medal is awarded by the President of the United States on behalf of the Congress.
Of the 3,464 Medals of Honor awarded as of September 17, 2009, an estimated 2,021 (58%) have been awarded to Irish-American recipients, more than twice the number awarded any other ethnic group; 257 Irish-born Americans have received the Medal of Honor which represents more than half of foreign-born MOH recipients. A monument to these Irish-born Medal of Honor recipients is located at Valley Forge's Medal of Honor Grove; erected by the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The first Irish American to receive the Medal was Michael Madden, who received it for his actions in the American Civil War (Note that the earliest action for which the Medal of Honor was awarded was to Irish American U.S. Army Assistant Surgeon Bernard J.D. Irwin for the engagement at Apache Pass, February 1861. The award was made three decades after the event and after Madden's award).
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- "60% of medal of honor recipients are Irish or Irish-American" | 2025-08-09 | 86 Upvotes 48 Comments
๐ The Article in the Most Languages
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- "The Article in the Most Languages" | 2025-08-09 | 241 Upvotes 77 Comments
๐ Jim Lovell Has Died
James Arthur Lovell Jr. ( LUV-ษl; March 25, 1928 โ August 7, 2025) was an American astronaut, naval aviator, test pilot and mechanical engineer. In 1968, as command module pilot of Apollo 8, he became, with Frank Borman and William Anders, one of the first three astronauts to fly to and orbit the Moon. He then commanded the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970 which, after a critical failure en route, looped around the Moon and returned safely to Earth. He acted in a few movies, such as The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Apollo 13 (1995; uncredited).
A graduate of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, in the class of 1952, Lovell flew F2H Banshee night fighters. This included a Western Pacific deployment aboard the aircraft carrier USSย Shangri-La. In January 1958, he entered a six-month test pilot training course at the Naval Air Test Center at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland, with Class 20 and graduated at the top of the class. He was then assigned to Electronics Test, working with radar, and in 1960 he became the Navy's McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II program manager. The following year he became a flight instructor and safety engineering officer at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and completed Aviation Safety School at the University of Southern California.
Lovell was not selected by NASA as one of the Mercury Seven astronauts due to a temporarily high bilirubin count. He was accepted in September 1962 as one of the second group of astronauts needed for the Gemini and Apollo programs. Prior to Apollo, Lovell flew in space on two Gemini missions, Gemini 7 (with Borman) in 1965 and Gemini 12 in 1966. He was the first person to fly into space four times. One of 24 people to have flown to the Moon, Lovell was the first to fly to the moon twice, and the only human to have done so without landing. He was a recipient of the Congressional Space Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He co-authored the 1994 book Lost Moon, on which the 1995 film Apollo 13 was based. Lovell was featured in a cameo appearance in the film.
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- "Jim Lovell Has Died" | 2025-08-08 | 14 Upvotes 5 Comments
๐ Gรถdel's Loophole
Gรถdel's Loophole is a "inner contradiction" in the Constitution of the United States which Austrian-German-American logician, mathematician, and analytic philosopher Kurt Gรถdel claimed to have discovered in 1947. The flaw would have allowed the American democracy to be legally turned into a dictatorship. Gรถdel told his friend Oskar Morgenstern about the existence of the flaw and Morgenstern told Albert Einstein about it at the time, but Morgenstern, in his recollection of the incident in 1971, never mentioned the exact problem as Gรถdel saw it. This has led to speculation about the precise nature of what has come to be called "Gรถdel's Loophole". It has been called "one of the great unsolved problems of constitutional law."
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- "Gรถdel's Loophole" | 2025-08-06 | 21 Upvotes 11 Comments
- "Gรถdel's Loophole" | 2023-07-24 | 21 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "Gรถdel's Loophole" | 2023-04-05 | 12 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "Gรถdel's Loophole" | 2023-01-20 | 10 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Gรถdel's Loophole" | 2021-03-25 | 131 Upvotes 130 Comments
๐ Slopsquatting
Slopsquatting is a type of cybersquatting. It is the practice of registering a non-existent software package name that a large language model (LLM) may hallucinate in its output, whereby someone unknowingly may copy-paste and install the software package without realizing it is fake. Attempting to install a non-existent package should result in an error, but some have exploited this for their gain in the form of typosquatting.
The name is a portmanteau of "slop" and "typosquatting".
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- "Slopsquatting" | 2025-08-06 | 105 Upvotes 49 Comments
๐ Bisbee Deportation
The Bisbee Deportation was the illegal kidnapping and deportation of about 1,300 striking mine workers, their supporters, and citizen bystanders by 2,000 members of a deputized posse, who arrested them beginning on July 12, 1917, in Bisbee, Arizona. The action was orchestrated by Phelps Dodge, the major mining company in the area, which provided lists of workers and others who were to be arrested to the Cochise County sheriff, Harry C. Wheeler. Those arrested were taken to a local baseball park before being loaded onto cattle cars and deported 200 miles (320ย km) to Tres Hermanas in New Mexico. The 16-hour journey was through desert without food and with little water. Once unloaded, the deportees, most without money or transportation, were warned against returning to Bisbee. The US government soon brought in members of the US Army to assist with relocating the deportees to Columbus, New Mexico.
As Phelps Dodge, in collusion with the sheriff, had closed down access to outside communications, it was some time before the story was reported. The company presented their action as reducing threats to United States interests in World War I in Europe, largely because the wartime demand for copper was heavy. The Governor of New Mexico, in consultation with President Woodrow Wilson, provided temporary housing for the deportees. A presidential mediation commission investigated the actions in November 1917, and in its final report, described the deportation as "wholly illegal and without authority in law, either State or Federal (Page 6)." Nevertheless, no individual, company, or agency was ever convicted in connection with the deportations. Arizona and Cochise County never prosecuted the case, and in United States v. Wheeler (1920), the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution by itself does not give the federal government the power to stop kidnappings, even ones involving moving abductees across state lines on federally-regulated railroads.
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- "Bisbee Deportation" | 2025-08-05 | 17 Upvotes 1 Comments
๐ Telefon Hรญrmondรณ: Listen to news and music electronically, in 1893
The Telefon Hรญrmondรณ (also Telefonhรญrmondรณ, generally translated as "Telephone Herald") was a "telephone newspaper" located in Budapest, Hungary, which, beginning in 1893, provided news and entertainment to subscribers over telephone lines. It was both the first and the longest surviving telephone newspaper system, although from 1 December 1925 until its termination in 1944 it was primarily used to retransmit programmes broadcast by Magyar Rรกdiรณ.
Three decades before the development of radio broadcasting, the Telefon Hรญrmondรณ was the first service to electronically deliver a wide range of spoken and musical programming to a diverse audience. Although its inventor envisioned that the technology could be eventually expanded to serve a national or international audience, the technical limitations of the time ultimately limited its service area to just the city of Budapest.
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- "Telefon Hรญrmondรณ: Listen to news and music electronically, in 1893" | 2025-08-04 | 107 Upvotes 37 Comments
๐ Descent of Inanna into the Underworld
The Descent of Inanna into the Underworld (or, in its Akkadian version, Descent of Ishtar into the Underworld) or Angalta ("From the Great Sky") is a Sumerian myth that narrates the descent of the goddess Inanna (Ishtar in Akkadian) into the Underworld to overthrow its ruler, her sister Ereshkigal, the "Queen of the Dead." But following the removal of her adornments, she perishes and her corpse is suspended on a nail. The god Enki intervenes indirectly, restoring Inanna to life. However, on her return journey, Inanna is required to deliver another living human in exchange for her freedom. She selects Dumuzi, her spouse, who is abruptly transported to the Underworld. In response to the pleas of Dumuzi's sister, Geshtinanna, his circumstances are somewhat ameliorated: he is permitted to remain in the Underworld for only a portion of the year, with his sister assuming his role for the remaining duration.
The myth exists in two main versions: one in Sumerian and the other in Akkadian. The Akkadian version was first discovered and translated in the 1860s. The existence of the longer and older Sumerian version was first established in the early 20th century, but it required approximately fifty years for epigraphists to fully reconstruct and translate it.
The story of Descent of Inanna into the Underworld offers insights into Mesopotamian culture through its numerous characters and developed plot. The influence of this culture on subsequent civilizations is evident in the traces of Mesopotamian elements found in Greece, Phoenicia, and the Old Testament. In the 20th century, the story was used by some psychoanalysis theorists to illustrate psychic mechanisms.
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- "Descent of Inanna into the Underworld" | 2025-07-30 | 36 Upvotes 10 Comments
๐ Iron law of oligarchy
The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by the German sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties. It asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an "iron law" within any democratic organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organization.
Michels's theory states that all complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies. Michels observed that since no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy, power within an organization will always get delegated to individuals within that group, elected or otherwise.
Using anecdotes from political parties and trade unions struggling to operate democratically to build his argument in 1911, Michels addressed the application of this law to representative democracy, and stated: "Who says organization, says oligarchy." He went on to state that "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy."
According to Michels all organizations eventually come to be run by a "leadership class", who often function as paid administrators, executives, spokespersons or political strategists for the organization. Far from being "servants of the masses", Michels argues this "leadership class," rather than the organization's membership, will inevitably grow to dominate the organization's power structures. By controlling who has access to information, those in power can centralize their power successfully, often with little accountability, due to the apathy, indifference and non-participation most rank and file members have in relation to their organization's decision-making processes. Michels argues that democratic attempts to hold leadership positions accountable are prone to fail, since with power comes the ability to reward loyalty, the ability to control information about the organization, and the ability to control what procedures the organization follows when making decisions. All of these mechanisms can be used to strongly influence the outcome of any decisions made 'democratically' by members.
Michels stated that the official goal of representative democracy of eliminating elite rule was impossible, that representative democracy is a faรงade legitimizing the rule of a particular elite, and that elite rule, which he refers to as oligarchy, is inevitable. Later Michels migrated to Italy and joined Benito Mussolini's Fascist Party, as he believed this was the next legitimate step of modern societies. The thesis became popular once more in post-war America with the publication of Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union (1956) and during the red scare brought about by McCarthyism.
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- "Iron Law of Oligarchy" | 2025-07-29 | 26 Upvotes 11 Comments
- "Iron law of oligarchy" | 2015-11-26 | 72 Upvotes 88 Comments
๐ Wikipedia: Signs of AI Writing
This is a list of phrases and formatting conventions typical of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, with real examples taken from Wikipedia articles and drafts. Note that not all text featuring the following indicators is AI-generated; large language models, which power AI-chatbots, have been trained on human writing, and humans might happen to have a writing style similar to that of an AI. Be cautious when relying on automated artificial intelligence detection software such as GPTZero. While these services perform better than random chance, they should not replace human judgment.
Beyond simply being indicators, the following phrasings and conventions often violate Wikipedia's Manual of Style or introduce a promotional or non-neutral tone; therefore appropriate use of AI chatbots on Wikipedia should not exhibit any of these indicators.
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- "Wikipedia: Signs of AI Writing" | 2025-07-27 | 61 Upvotes 17 Comments