Rush Hour

I’ve had some interesting rush hour road blocks out here. One time there was a bobcat sitting on the hood of my car (he left before I could get my camera) and another time there was an elk standing there, looking huge.

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The Use of Nuclear Weapons – 2

It was a dark and stormy night in Okinawa, 1962; the seas were beaten into foam by the wind that howled across the island.

No, that’s not right. But it seemed like a better setting for “almost the end of the world.” And there was a storm, but it was a storm of toxic, invisible, lies. Lies were the fuel of the cold war; their target was the population of the whole planet, who were not trusted with anything close to the truth.

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The Use of Nuclear Weapons

Lately, the topic has gotten some air. That’s good, because – in my opinion – most people do not adequately understand the tremendous whopper-level lies that governments have told about nuclear weapons. I have raised some of this topic before, but it’s worth hammering on: the stated use of nuclear weapons is as a deterrent, yet none of the countries that might be involved in a nuclear war have nuclear arsenals that are oriented toward a deterrent purpose. If that doesn’t make you wonder, what will?

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Questioning Arbitrary Authority

Robert Paul Wolff is one of my favorite writers. I came across his work completely by accident: dad was getting rid of a few dozen boxes of books (“the overflow”) and one of the boxes contained a slim volume entitled In Defense of Anarchism. I did a brief 3-post series on it [stderr] because I think it’s an important work in its field – he deploys some of the basic arguments for anarchism in a way that is very hard to argue with. [wc]

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Retaliation Strikes That Miss

Resistance to an occupying power is a human right, the nationalists say. I’ve always felt that arrangement was set up because even nationalists eventually figure out that eventually you’re not the top dog, anymore. It’s a sort of a back door built into the system for authoritarians to justify their eventual resistance to any power that overcomes them.

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