A recent article in The Guardian describes brutal put-down of protests in Kashmir; the Indian government is “using pellet guns” on civilians and has blinded several. (Trigger warning: guns, violence, political repression)
Enroute to Vienna, connecting through Copenhagen airport on an SAS flight out of Washington, Dulles, I slept badly because of a the onset of a gout attack in my right ankle…
A couple of years ago, I read some reference to Klein bottles, which made me decide to see how well people have represented them on 2D surfaces. So I google image-searched them and hit the wrong option in my search bar, which took me to Ebay instead of Google.
If you read Donald Trump’s victory speech, you can see that we’re going to have a great deal of progress made in the war on authenticity. Trump’s speech was clearly not a carefully prepared and manicured product from a writing-room.
(This is an edited re-post from my old ranum.com site)
Most people don’t realize how gosh-darned easy it is to make pizza dough. So they go buy something from the supermarket that’s made of plastic, wrapped in plastic, and intended to be covered in plastic. Let me give you some advice:
Don’t Do It.
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It’s going to be an interesting 4 years.
So, this morning I’ll be tottling down to the polling place to cast my vote; a vote which we all recognize lies somewhere between a part of democracy, and an opinion poll. It’s mostly a waste of time, I think, but I live in a swing-state and I loathe Trump, and I’m casting my vote as a “twittergram to the donald” more than anything else.
In my recent post “Nationalism Is A Lie” there was so much horror behind what I wrote, that I was either going to have to write a textbook-length incoherent screed,* or leave a lot on the table. So I thought that rather than diverticulating into asides, I’d post this piece separately.
Trigger warning: really horrible people doing really horrible things, with a walk-on by the Roman Catholic Church
Jean Meslier
By metaphysics, God is made a pure spirit, but has modern theology advanced one step further than the theology of the barbarians?
The first poem I learned by heart was Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” (here)
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,And towards our distant rest began to trudge.Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hootsOf gas-shells dropping softly behind.
If any question why we died,Tell them, because our fathers lied.