The other night I was doing some google-whacking, looking for coverage regarding which of Trump’s advisors may have played an active role in talking him into the very bad idea that he could extend his time in office illegally.
I grew up in New York from age zero to six, when my family moved to Baltimore. Dad left Columbia University after the student riots [chronicle] and took a position at Johns Hopkins University. I still consider myself a New Yorker when it’s convenient to be.
Parler is a security disaster in progress.
Last night, I found myself obsessively reading about Hitler’s beer hall putsch. So many journalists are calling Trump’s coup attempt stuff like “the beer belly putsch” etc., that I figure the back-story is probably more interesting.
Depending on how you count it, the numbers may not be exact. The records of what happened are not as good as they ought to be, for reasons that will become clear.
It’s an act of hopefulness to make art; the artist is implicitly hoping that something of their creation will survive even if it’s only in memory. When I’m feeling stressed or at loose ends, I try to create something, even if it’s just for myself. I guess it helps cement my existence, to myself.
Of course, I have thoughts about today. In no particular order, with no particular organization, they are as follows.
When Julius Caesar was 25, he was temporarily kidnapped by Cilician pirates [brit] who mocked him for his aristocratic airs and youth.
The surveillance state has spent billions and billions of dollars building massive monitoring and data back-haul capabilities, with “fusion centers” that automate analytics and run pre-planned searches for stuff.
Hanna Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism has been widely quoted, lately. To say it’s interesting is an understatement, but I have long felt that she’s over-generalizing the commonalities between Stalinism and Hitlerism.