I’ve been busy running around building forms for casting the liner for the forge body, and dealing with a bunch of other stuff, including stressing out about my first colonoscopy, which is tuesday morning.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
I’ve been busy running around building forms for casting the liner for the forge body, and dealing with a bunch of other stuff, including stressing out about my first colonoscopy, which is tuesday morning.
I’ve been depressing lately. This should make you feel better:
It was a dark and stormy night in Okinawa, 1962; the seas were beaten into foam by the wind that howled across the island.
No, that’s not right. But it seemed like a better setting for “almost the end of the world.” And there was a storm, but it was a storm of toxic, invisible, lies. Lies were the fuel of the cold war; their target was the population of the whole planet, who were not trusted with anything close to the truth.
Lately, the topic has gotten some air. That’s good, because – in my opinion – most people do not adequately understand the tremendous whopper-level lies that governments have told about nuclear weapons. I have raised some of this topic before, but it’s worth hammering on: the stated use of nuclear weapons is as a deterrent, yet none of the countries that might be involved in a nuclear war have nuclear arsenals that are oriented toward a deterrent purpose. If that doesn’t make you wonder, what will?
Robert Paul Wolff is one of my favorite writers. I came across his work completely by accident: dad was getting rid of a few dozen boxes of books (“the overflow”) and one of the boxes contained a slim volume entitled In Defense of Anarchism. I did a brief 3-post series on it [stderr] because I think it’s an important work in its field – he deploys some of the basic arguments for anarchism in a way that is very hard to argue with. [wc]
Resistance to an occupying power is a human right, the nationalists say. I’ve always felt that arrangement was set up because even nationalists eventually figure out that eventually you’re not the top dog, anymore. It’s a sort of a back door built into the system for authoritarians to justify their eventual resistance to any power that overcomes them.
When I encounter wildly different perspectives, I freeze in place like the proverbial rabbit in headlights. My brain just locks up for a couple seconds then starts running furiously trying to re-establish some kind of understanding of what’s going on. Sometimes, I reach for meta-understanding, i.e.: “I don’t know what’s going on but this is really messed up.”
Back during the run-up for Gulf War II, there was discussion about how much it was going to cost (remember when they said it’d be a mere $300bn and Iraq would pay for it by having its oil looted?)
If I hear one more unoriginal journalist hack out the phrase “everything changed” – related to 9/11, I’m going to scream.
In an earlier post, I commented about CIA’s Base Eagle in Kabul [stderr]. It’s fun to find such things, but I wanted to keep my obsessive curiousity disengaged. It’s easy to spend all night scrolling around and eyeballing the world below. And, it’s interesting to see how the views of a place are different.