Military ‘exercises’ are a form of imperial messaging. Right now, the US has troops in Poland in what is being described with Orwellian irony as “anti-Russian aggression NATO exercises”[1]
The troops will rotate training in Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia for the next nine months. The regional training exercises are also designed to test how U.S. forces respond on short notice to a possible conflict with Russia.
Lately, my travels have taken me to Seattle a few times. Amazingly, I find I am terrified of the Cascadia Subduction Zone. I know, intellectually, that the odds it’ll rip loose while I’m there are maybe 20,000:1 or thereabouts – but that’s actually a whole lot higher than I like!
If you’re interested in the swirling scrimmage around attributing the “Russia” cyberattacks on the US 2016 election, there’s another fun bit of analysis dropped today:[1]
I’ve been avoiding writing about this because my supply of expletives needed to regenerate. And, frankly, I’m a bit baffled by the topic – whenever I try to think about this, I wind up with my jaw hanging, scratching my butt, and going, “can there possibly be more to this story that I simply do not understand?”
I’m talking, of course, about the 2 main guns on the USS Zumwalt.
From the San Francisco Call, November 14, 1913.
“Spug” is the unattractive nickname of a society which is doing a useful service in discouraging the giving of useless presents. The full name of the organization is the “Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving,” or S. P. U. G., “spug.” The society was organized last year and has just begun its 1913 campaign to discourage the habit of indiscriminate and unnecessary gift making.
Sometimes, you get large, carefully-wrapped packages!!!
I thought “no way someone’d send me 30lbs of ammonium nitrate, so it’s gotta be something else!”
I recently posted a bit about voice editing and voice fakery – my immediate reaction was “uh oh” but I’ve got some personal perspective on the topic. I’ve been a photographer since about 1992 (when I started getting serious about it) and a photoshop user since version 1. Fakery? It’s all fake.
A friend of mine once described gambling as a tax upon the people who never studied statistics.
Apparently there is some question as to whether George Washington’s family tree was lily white after all. White people often raped slaves*
