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.
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?
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]
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.
When I encounter wildly different perspectives, I freeze in place like the proverbial rabbit in headlights. My brain just locks up for a couple seconds then starts running furiously trying to re-establish some kind of understanding of what’s going on. Sometimes, I reach for meta-understanding, i.e.: “I don’t know what’s going on but this is really messed up.”
Back during the run-up for Gulf War II, there was discussion about how much it was going to cost (remember when they said it’d be a mere $300bn and Iraq would pay for it by having its oil looted?)
If I hear one more unoriginal journalist hack out the phrase “everything changed” – related to 9/11, I’m going to scream.
In an earlier post, I commented about CIA’s Base Eagle in Kabul [stderr]. It’s fun to find such things, but I wanted to keep my obsessive curiousity disengaged. It’s easy to spend all night scrolling around and eyeballing the world below. And, it’s interesting to see how the views of a place are different.
One thing I love about metalwork is that there’s so many paths you can walk down pursuing your muse. The same applies to all materials, of course: clay, steel, paint, wood, whatever. But I love steel because there is such a level of commitment to working with something so obdurate.
I’m a bit baffled by the attention that Americans pay to pillows. Don’t get me wrong: I love a great big pile of pillows to sleep in, but on youtube I’ve seen adds for cubic pillows, weird conforming pillows, and elsewhere anime-print pillows of sexy girls. And then there’s “mypillow guy” arch MAGA-head.