Years ago, I read Massey’s Dreadnought and the Coming of The Great War [amzn] and one tidbit stuck in my mind: naval blockades are an act of war. Of course, it’s more complicated than that, usually cutting down to the core of the conflict – war supplies or food.
My family used to sometimes make expeditions to New York; we’d take the train up on a summer morning from Baltimore station, stepping out into the magic wonder-land of the city at 34th Street Station.
There is a bunch of strange stuff surfacing surrounding the alleged incident in which the NSA allegedly tried to buy back stolen data from an alleged Russian hacker. I’m tracking it, but there are still many shoes that need to drop before the story begins to even make a shred of sense.
Peter York did a book called Dictator Style in 2006 [amazn], including pictures of Saddam Hussein’s palaces, Noriega’s christmas tree, Caesescu’s bathroom, and other disturbing oddities.
Some of the fake news that the righteous fringe get is the Jim Bakker sort: it’s the end of days, buy our bucket of tasteless high-calorie chum. Sometimes I get really nasty stuff, like this.
Just lean over there and hit the “rewind” button for a second; take us back to… July 2016.
This is sort of upsetting. I’d rather be able to have precog powers that let me pick stock prices, than this.
Over at Pharyngula, PZ posted a link to the extremely depressing article about what the climate-change future looks like for humanity. [pha] It’s bad.
One fascinating characteristic of the well-indoctrinated ultra-nationalist is they tend to lose their sense of reflexivity. Ultra-nationalism depends on authoritarianism and exceptionalism, so it doesn’t hold up well to challenges against its authority – after all, it wouldn’t have to be authoritarian if it were possible to justify their beliefs. What we wind up with is this weird sort of “what I say, goes, as long as it applies in the direction I want it to.”
In the late 90s, I was in an abusive relationship with someone who had serious trust issues – or, who pretended to as a way of manipulating me. My view is that it was the latter, but I’m willing believe that they believed what they said. Life gets complicated like that, sometimes.