If the world is destroyed, it will be a white-collar crime, done in a business-like way, by large numbers of individuals involved in a chain of actions, each one having a touch of innocence.
Howard Zinn
– From Dow Shall Not Kill
I’ve come across Uncommon Sense – a book of quotes from the speeches and writings of Howard Zinn [amazon] – it is a fabulous “toilet tank book”, something you can read in those short pauses to contemplate.
My first grinder was a dual-wheel 1/16hp bench grinder I got at a yard sale for $5 in 1976. It turned on and off with a little switch that was between the wheels – perfectly set up so you could catch the sleeve of your hoodie in the spinning wheels and make a great mess. Luckily it was only 1/16hp.
… And the winner may be: Commentariat Comrade Reginald Selkirk. Comrade Selkirk, your [classified] [REDACTED] award has been placed in the award-vault and [REDACTED] 2,000 feet [classified] concrete.
You can buy a cop’s soul for a measly $3,000-$6,000. I hope every one of them realizes how their bosses and unions have just debased them. They probably don’t care – if they were the kind of people who care, they wouldn’t be cops. If you recall, I believe that being a cop is one of the handful of inherently immoral jobs [stderr].
Back when I was doing road-shows to raise money for the start-up that didn’t happen, several of the venture capitalists we met with said things like, “right now, we’re investing in blockchain.” As far as I am concerned, they could just have easily said “quantum.”
Content Warning: War, Death
The Turkish move into Kurdish-controlled Syria near Manbij has not been entirely successful. The only surprise is that anyone is surprised.
Peter York did a book called Dictator Style in 2006 [amazn], including pictures of Saddam Hussein’s palaces, Noriega’s christmas tree, Caesescu’s bathroom, and other disturbing oddities.
One of The Commentariat(tm) suggested I might want to read Len Beadell’s various works about the times he spent in the outback surveying roads for the Australian nuclear weapons program, and other things. By the time I was a few pages in to Beating Around The Bush [amazn] I was transfixed with a mix of horror and awe.
There is a whole new wave of spam coming in – it’s all about growing your own body-parts from your own body-parts. Presumably this is a set-up for “live forever!” spam, coming to an in-box, soon.
It seems to me that, in order to have “fun” a creature needs some sort of self-awareness: “I am doing something that amuses me.” There’s some more than basic cause/effect analysis going on, there, as well: “I do this thing and I have fun.” Can we say it’s a creative process?
