That’s a rhetorical question, but I was thinking something today, about Palestine.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
That’s a rhetorical question, but I was thinking something today, about Palestine.
When I was in high school, my mom brightly suggested my dad and I should go see the movie Gallipoli. Dad looked over at me with horror for a second, trying to figure out what to say, other than “that does not sound uplifting.”
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the US abandonment of Afghanistan to the Taliban has had a major impact on the amount of opium being produced in the country. [unodc]
I recently managed to find (ebay!) a book I have been looking for for quite a while: Tom Gervasi’s 1986 The Myth of Soviet Military Supremacy. (ISBN 0-06-015574-4)
I’m going to declare this up front: I have no private knowledge about this topic; my beliefs are formed by a lot of study of the topic since 1978, a lot of strategy gaming, and a lot of news reading. Naturally, any commentary about nuclear strategy is going to be either a) ignorant except for open source material or b) muzzled by secrecy. I.e.: Those that talk about this stuff are ignorant, those that aren’t ignorant are silent.
Back in the mid 90s I had an unusual experience, in which I was caught in the blast-corona of Operation Sundevil – the Secret Service’s attempt to gain relevance in cybersecurity [wik]. My role was small but it made me realize that the government, at that time, was ignorant enough that they could easily be stampeded into doing stupid things, a form of “terrorism by stupid cop” which I later re-framed as “a denial of clue attack.”
Field-expedient repairs are sometimes expected. You haven’t got all the gear to make a proper fix, so you log a maintenance report saying something like, “I did not have the correct threaded bolt to replace it correctly, so I forced the wrong bolt on to the nut with a pipe-wrench, just to hold the thing together until we got home.”
The domain name is suspicious, but it’s a plausible site – so, how are we supposed to tell if that’s really the Florida department of education, or just some very subtle trolling?
Gosh, the people in Washington sure do like to lie. And the supine media (who want to think of themselves as “watchdogs”) (more like “watch chinchillas”) report what they are given in “talking points” memos.
In case you’ve been dead and buried for the last couple of months, the current big kerfuffle in Washington is a bunch of play-acting about how we haven’t got enough money for this or that useful social program. And, as always, there’s another social program that goes unmentioned: the defense budget. It’s a social program, right? It’s just oriented toward destroying societies.
A dozen years ago, I read Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and that provoked a lengthy peripheral interest in the problem of using legalisms to deal with the unexpectedly nasty monsters that occasionally crop up in humanity. As a moral nihilist [*] the nazi elite seemed tractable to me: they were just a bunch of power-drunk assholes who managed to gain power over a country with a great military, and they went on a great rampage, doing whatever got them off.