You probably already have heard of this; if you haven’t, I’m sorry.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
You probably already have heard of this; if you haven’t, I’m sorry.
The US is one of the most barbarous countries on Earth. Sure, there are worse – places that execute citizens in what amounts to Hammurrabi’s code – but we pretend to be an advanced democratic republic. Briefly, let’s jump down that rathole: in principle the United States is a state organized along the lines of State Legitimacy, i.e.: a social contract in which the state is allowed to enforce certain things on an otherwise independent populace, in return for the populace expecting certain things from the state. What sort of things might those be? A social safety net? Health care? Minimal pointless wars? The right of the citizen to be secure in their possessions and pursuit of happiness? Being cruelly put to death when the state follows its “due process” and eventually decides its time?
There are lots of “influencers” who are kind of sketchy. Well, all of them. But for someone like myself, with a memory for past photographs, it can be a bit of a problem.
Right now, we are being treated to a fascinating mix of genius and antigenius, whipsawed between incredible stupidity and last-minute cancellations of the same – which is a form of genius. As Sun Tzu said, deception is the root of strategy – in which case just confusing the living fuck out of everybody has to be one of the fruit of the deception branch. There are so many things wrong, even with the mistakes being made, that the whole thing would make a great Monty Python skit, except the Pythons were trying to be funny.
As a former security guy, it’s hard to imagine an end-user who’s worse than the current dumbass-in-chief. He’s the kind of idiot who would post photos including the GPS co-ordinates. Not because he’s a 5G warfare expert, but because he’s 6G stupid. The 5G AIs are still cycling in tight loops printing “brain hurts brain hurts brain hurts brain …” over and over.
There are a few things I find fascinating about the current war. First and foremost, it’s a war of attrition and apparently that never occurred to the pentagon command structure. One of the things that Europe learned pretty thoroughly before the Franco-Prussian War, is that an experienced command structure that knows how to communicate and plan is essential. Or so we would think.
Apparently the Iranians managed to tag an F-35.
I have wargamed war in the gulf a few times. And, as you know, I’m a fan of Millennium Challenge 2000. [stderr]
In various discussions about “what do we do with Venezuela?” we should not ignore that the people asking the question are representatives of a military superpower who took it upon itself to intervene in Venezuelan politics.
I’m not in favor of assassinations; I’m especially not fond of sloppy wet work.