If you ever find yourself believing that America is or was ever great, you can cure it with a dose of Howard Zinn. It won’t take much, but sometimes it aches going down. If you don’t have any Zinn handy, you can substitute Chomsky.
Researching a bit about the Mizar, I stumbled across an account of the NR-1, written by one of its officers. [nr-1] If you’re interested in cold war exploration stories, and “going to sea in very awkward shipboats” stories, it’s pretty good.
I’m just going to quote large chunks from this piece by The Guardian [guard] and not add much commentary of my own; it’d be redundant.
Picture walking through an airport with this phone case glued to your ear.
If you tend to curl up in terror when confronted by the evil that is militarism and nationalism, you may want to skip this post. See also: [stderr]
Over at Pharyngula, PZ posted a link to the extremely depressing article about what the climate-change future looks like for humanity. [pha] It’s bad.
Even as a kid, I must have developed a sense that advertisements are not-seen. I probably had not yet become allergic to propaganda, so this stuff slid into and off of my consciousness, leaving relatively little residue.
This should shock exactly nobody. China has been using the small amount of Uyghur terrorism they have been experiencing as an excuse to dramatically upgrade their surveillance technology.
This sort of thing really worries me. I don’t think that it’s at all about “catching criminals” or protecting one’s family.
My subconscious is a horrible nag and pretty much never shuts down unless I’m on opiates. Last night, I was dealing with some “issues” from an afternoon of mess (more on that later, once the problem is resolved) and my subconscious was clearly thinking about metallurgy – specifically creative ideas for layering blade steels.