Jose was awesome; he brought in the table with the room-service and explained “I added a few pieces of bread to your order.”
“Thanks! I love carbs with my carbs!*” and he laughed with me as I signed the bill and handed him some cash with it.
tl;dr: make sure you have a good supply of popcorn.
I grew up with revolutions; my father is a historian and his specialty was the evolution of absolutism under Louis XIV and the lead-up French Revolutions that culminated in the big one and the terror.
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)
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
One of the things about having a gasoline pipeline go near you, is all the cool explosions. Obviously something is wrong with the indigenous people in North Dakota, they don’t like explosions and the smell of gasoline? It’s free entertainment.
Hmmmm? What’s that you say? The executives of pipeline companies don’t live near pipelines either? I’m shocked.
I was struck speechless to read that the Iraqi army has brought its handful of TOS-1 “Buratino” thermobaric rocket launchers into the field at Mosul.
From “Applied Eugenics” by Paul Popenoe, 1918 (MacMillan)
The United States birth-rate may, on its face, appear high enough; but its face does not show that this height is due largely to the fecundity of immigrant women. Statistics to prove this are given in Chapter XIII, but may be supplemented here by some figures from Pittsburgh.
A few years ago, I read a book about the big terrorist bombing in New York. You know, the one in 1920. And it got me interested in the turmoil of the time – a time when, largely due to the depression, Americans were realizing that capitalism wasn’t quite their friend after all. So I wound up reading about the bonus army and how they were suppressed with cavalry and tanks commanded by heroes.