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.
Enroute to Vienna, connecting through Copenhagen airport on an SAS flight out of Washington, Dulles, I slept badly because of a the onset of a gout attack in my right ankle…
If you read Donald Trump’s victory speech, you can see that we’re going to have a great deal of progress made in the war on authenticity. Trump’s speech was clearly not a carefully prepared and manicured product from a writing-room.
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.
Florian smiled around the edge of his beer and said, wryly, “We Swiss are not pacifists because we are weak; it’s because we were rental soldiers in the dark age and renaissance. Fighting for your own selfish reasons is bad marketing.”
I’ve always been suspicious of power.* One of the warning signs I’m especially alert to is when I see language being bent or waterboarded in the interest of obscuring facts, rather than clarifying them. When a new word suddenly begins to take on a heavily-freighted meaning, e.g: “ethnic cleansing” instead of “genocide” I immediately ask myself “why that word, and not the other perfectly useable words?” The sudden promotion of or carpet-bombing with a new term is often an indicator that someone has decided to start using a new word with a subtly different definition – basically, lying by redefining the truth.
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 wrote about how Hitler and many of his upper echelon leaders were smashed on opiates or amphetamines, or both. When I finished that summary, I mentally bookmarked to look up whatever I could find about allied leaders’ drug use during WWII; Winston Churchill, of course, was a notable drinker.
It sounds as though the National Republican Senatorial Committee has a problem with its email servers, too. Let me shorten this somewhat: if you’re putting Microsoft Exchange on an internet-facing server, and you’re not managing it fairly carefully, you’re snack food for hackers.