Normally, I do not get involved in conspiracist thinking. I guess I have a pretty basic world view: it’s round, there were dinosaurs, evolution is real, aliens are not anal probing trailer park drunks, Oswald shot Kennedy, etc.
It’s funny how much effort we put into building redundant and reliable systems (e.g.: “cloud computing”) that scale and replicate well – yet they are subject to the simplest of attacks that can disable them.
Gervasi performs a detailed case study regarding how the cruise missile and Pershing II were sold to the American public. Warning: if you’re not already a cynic, this may be hazardous to your mental state.
Over on Daily Kos, I encountered someone proclaiming officially that it is anti-semitism to conflate the actions of Israel with the actions of nazis. I’d like to noodle around that idea a bit, because it makes me quite uncomfortable.
In the computer security world, the vulnerability of open above-ground transformer parks is a well-known problem. It’s been a hypothetical on many a threat model for decades.
Content Warning: Violence, Militarism
This popped up thanks to the youtube imperialism algorithm, or something. It’s nothing I’d have ever thought to look for because, frankly, the idea is so dumb and bad, it’s nothing I’d have ever imagined.
When I start hearing the old trope about plucky rebels attempting to overthrow a vicious government, my first reaction is to check and see if the story is being carried by The New York Times and, if it is, I search for “${region} CIA involvement”. I’m sad that we live in such a cynical world, but that’s what it is.
I am contemptuous of the stupidity of anti-vaxxers; anyone who studies the merest whiff of epidemiology and virology is going to understand that vaccines are a really good thing. All you have to do is ask anyone you know who has suffered from smallpox. Oh, you don’t know anyone who has had smallpox? End of discussion.
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.
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.”