Big chisel-grinds have always been my favorite; I never really thought about why.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
Big chisel-grinds have always been my favorite; I never really thought about why.
Some sportsball event is being held (or has been held; that’s not the point) in Omaha. And, as usual, it’s stimulating the local economy.
Echoes of Roméo Dallaire’s nightmares rumbled in my subconscious for years after I read his book Shake Hands With The Devil, [wc] about the Rwanda genocide. While the carnage began, Dallaire was the commander on the scene with the only professional military force; he was repeatedly ordered to steer clear of getting involved while the UN and diplomats and presidents flapped their hands on television. It was then, Dallaire reminds us, that the entire international community started using elaborate vocabulary in order to avoid uttering the word “genocide.”
In the late 1990s, the US Government was setting up a case to argue that hacking equated to terrorism. Because, while it was mostly being used for illicit state-craft, it could potentially be used by terrorists. In 1997, at a keynote for Black Hat Briefings, I warned the hacker community what was coming but – at that time – there was a great deal of “community outreach” being done by NSA – they were hiring hackers (whose work we now see leaking on a regular basis) and it was all very hip and friendly.
In The Year of The Pig one of the striking moments, which I focused on, [stderr] is when several of the people promoting the US’ involvement in Vietnam used the same construction for their arguments; it was clear that they were tapped into a common source – presumably what are now called “talking points memos” produced by government agencies in order to get out a consistent “message” to the public.
There was no prior knowledge on my part; I guess that once the cat was out of the bag, a lot of people figured it out pretty quickly. [stderr]
There’s an arms-control wonk on twitter, Martin Pfeiffer (“Lick the Bomb”) who has a very impressive collection of nuclear weapons photos and such.
My policy toward drug use is pretty open: do what you want, carefully, and accept the consequences if you screw up.
The US is still at war: overt war such as Afghanistan, and covert wars all over the world. Let’s have a day of remembrance.
WARNING: War, Death, Sam Harris
WARNING: LONG