I read a lot. I sometimes have thoughts when I read things. Sometimes the stuff I read is interesting, other times it’s not.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
I read a lot. I sometimes have thoughts when I read things. Sometimes the stuff I read is interesting, other times it’s not.
Bacevich asks the question, “Where is the strategy?”
A nation priding itself on having the world’s greatest military – and we do – unquestionably have the world’s greatest military – has misused its military power on an epic scale. It’s not simply that we have not prevailed, although obviously we have not prevailed, rather it is that through a combination of naivete, short-sightedness, and hubris we have actually made matters worse. (10:17)
Tremble Before Us (as long as you’re comfortable doing so)
Now more than ever, the message of the Unitarian Jihad is appropriate:
Trump wants to bump defense spending another 10%.[wp]
Jean Meslier
Let us proceed to the pretended visions and Divine Revelations, upon which our Christ-worshipers establish the truth and the certainty of their religion.
In order to give a just idea of it, I believe it is best to say in general, that they are such, that if any one should dare now to boast of similar ones, or wish to make them valued, he would certainly be regarded as a fool or a fanatic.
I started writing this as a sort of open snark-gram to Caitlyn Jenner, but I just couldn’t do it. As I started to think things through from different angles, I just got more and more depressed. So, I hit “Move to Trash” and tried again.
Root cause analysis, for me, always comes back to privilege, which is an instance of exceptionalism.
If you’re not familiar with Derek Lowe’s “In the Pipeline” blog, you should be. Whether you’re a chemist or not, his writing is witty and wonderful and breathes zing and pizazz into, uh, your breath-mask. [things I won’t work with]
There were scandals a few years ago regarding test-cheating by operators of the US’ strategic missile systems. [nyt] But that’s just cheating. What about “rank incompetence” in the forces that prop up the nihilist triad of ‘mutual assured destruction’?
Voltaire by Houdon
We know of no religion without prayers; even the Jews have them – even though they had no published formulas back in the days when they chanted their canticles in their synagogues, those arrived much later.
I’ve keynoted and attended a lot of conferences in the course of my career. So, naturally, a piece of spam that looks like it’s a conference invitation goes right through my bayesian spam classifier.