We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
The US and its allies have set up a re-match for the Cuban Missile Crisis, which most people recognize as the time humanity was closest to a full-up nuclear war. Congratulations, American presidents!
Lately, there has been a lot of discussion about the US’ slide into fascism, whether or not Trump is a fascist, etc. It’s interesting, because yes indeed the US is on the cusp of collapsing from a pseudo-democracy into an authoritarian empire, but it also conceals a deeper problem. Namely, that the US has always been more or less fascist. I.e.: “I was fascist, before fascism was even cool.”
My experience with LSD taught me an unsettling thing: it’s so mind-reversing that there is a tendency to proselytize the stuff. It can be transformative, for some, though for me it just made the music fantastic.
Content Warning: Violence, Militarism
This popped up thanks to the youtube imperialism algorithm, or something. It’s nothing I’d have ever thought to look for because, frankly, the idea is so dumb and bad, it’s nothing I’d have ever imagined.
In [stderr] I hypothesized that the republicans are “all in” on taking over the US government and mooting any remaining shreds of American democracy – thin and compromised as they are.
I’ve read through the powerpoint deck that was circulating among the Jan 6 coup plotters. It’s on archive.org [arch] and it’s pretty interesting reading. It occurred to me that it’d be an interesting series of postings, to go through it a couple slides at a time, except it’s 36 slides of unadulterated bullshit and that would be a pretty hefty load for us all.
I came home from the shop last night around 4:30, while there was still some light; passing the turn-off into the neighbor’s corn field (they grow corn to attract the deer so they can shoot them while they eat) I saw a silver pickup truck parked back in the corner, which is the end closest to my property. Here we go, again.
Recent conversations about small modular reactors reminded me about the US government’s history of leaving and losing nuclear reactors in various places, during the cold war. To be fair, the Soviets lost a few, too. And, even recently – one aspect of the Russian submarine Kursk that sunk in 2000 [wik] that didn’t get a lot of air-play was the fact that a nuclear reactor and several nuclear warheads sank with it. That must have made recovering the wreck interesting, and I’m sure that NATO intelligence was skipping about with glee at a chance to literally dissect a Russian ballistic missile sub. I wonder how many times the Soviets got to perform similar dissections on US gear?
I recently listened to the audiobook version of a series of lectures and Q&A with Noam Chomsky. If you have problems with being depressed into immobility by world politics and economics, I don’t recommend it. This is a sort-of review of the audiobook, with some comments by me and some quotes, and I plan to, over time, post a few passages from it.