In [stderr] I hypothesized that the republicans are “all in” on taking over the US government and mooting any remaining shreds of American democracy – thin and compromised as they are.
Stderr
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In [stderr] I hypothesized that the republicans are “all in” on taking over the US government and mooting any remaining shreds of American democracy – thin and compromised as they are.
I’ve read through the powerpoint deck that was circulating among the Jan 6 coup plotters. It’s on archive.org [arch] and it’s pretty interesting reading. It occurred to me that it’d be an interesting series of postings, to go through it a couple slides at a time, except it’s 36 slides of unadulterated bullshit and that would be a pretty hefty load for us all.
I came home from the shop last night around 4:30, while there was still some light; passing the turn-off into the neighbor’s corn field (they grow corn to attract the deer so they can shoot them while they eat) I saw a silver pickup truck parked back in the corner, which is the end closest to my property. Here we go, again.
Recent conversations about small modular reactors reminded me about the US government’s history of leaving and losing nuclear reactors in various places, during the cold war. To be fair, the Soviets lost a few, too. And, even recently – one aspect of the Russian submarine Kursk that sunk in 2000 [wik] that didn’t get a lot of air-play was the fact that a nuclear reactor and several nuclear warheads sank with it. That must have made recovering the wreck interesting, and I’m sure that NATO intelligence was skipping about with glee at a chance to literally dissect a Russian ballistic missile sub. I wonder how many times the Soviets got to perform similar dissections on US gear?
I recently listened to the audiobook version of a series of lectures and Q&A with Noam Chomsky. If you have problems with being depressed into immobility by world politics and economics, I don’t recommend it. This is a sort-of review of the audiobook, with some comments by me and some quotes, and I plan to, over time, post a few passages from it.
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.
This is an important story, that the news media tried to just sort of … slip past, without dwelling on it. But it’s an important indicator of how and why our political media has become such a mess. Of course I believe it has always been a mess – for example, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison founded a newspaper [wik] as a self-propaganda arm against the federalists, and it has just gone downhill from there.
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.
From the “nobody should be surprised but everyone should be shocked” department, Israel has apparently decided that it’s going to keep the Golan heights.
Congress ought to be holding hearings to investigate the FBI’s non-competence as it sat around with its thumb up its butt while a nearly successful coup brewed. Remember, the FBI is the organization that is responsible for domestic counter-terrorism – the organization that notoriously spends a great deal of time creating terrorist plots so they can arrest the people who fall into their snare – their job is to do things like, well, stopping coups. The US people and government have placed an inordinate amount of trust (and money) in the FBI and we ought to be investigating the monumental incompetence of the agency.