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
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.”
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.
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.
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.
I had a brainfart the other day, when someone said something about “the commentariat” over at FtB.
So I made the commentariat a logo.
Let me introduce you to the “intelligence Catch-22.” In case you’re not familiar with Heller’s Catch-22, from the brilliant book by that name, it goes like this:
You cannot possibly get a medical discharge from the military based on insanity, because only insane people want to be in the military; therefore if you want to be discharged from the military you are sane and therefore your discharge is denied.
We keep hearing about it: Russians are manipulating the election! They’re leaking this and that, and hacking this and that, and it’s going to change everything.
I wish.