I nearly made skid-marks just reading between the lines of this one:
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
I nearly made skid-marks just reading between the lines of this one:
According to Pagetutor, this is what $1Bn looks like, if you palletize it: [page]
I can’t tell if the media get handed stories, “here, print this” or if they actually think about them (or pretend to) and then print the government’s talking-points, anyway.
Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:
Government (you can especially see this, nowadays, in the US) does not act as a unit. It’s too big to generally agree on all of the disparate agendas it contains at any given time. It’s not that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, it’s more like that the left foot and the right foot keep stepping on each other, deliberately.
Whenever I drive down to Dulles Airport (IAD) outside of Washington, I go over the Potomac near Point of Rocks, which is just outside of Harpers’ Ferry. Perhaps those names don’t ring bells, but it was a place of some historical importance in 1859.
Don’t you wonder what kind of bolt-holes the wealthy and powerful are building, now, against the new crop of threats? Other than the ridiculous “let’s colonize Mars with rich white people!” meme, they have to know the global warming hammer is going to drop soon and the die-back and displacement is going to be violent. They’ll want a “mineshaft gap.”
It’s unfashionable to make moral equivocations between 9/11 and what the US and its allies have done in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. It was a cruel and malicious act of terrorism, without a doubt, and triggered an amazingly violent – indiscriminately violent – response from the US. The US regime’s reaction to 9/11 was one of those “If A wrongs me, I am going to feel justified in wronging B and C in return.” Except, of course, ‘retaliation’ doesn’t apply when you’re claiming revenge on the wrong target. As the US did, knowingly and deliberately.
As expected [stderr] the wars in Syria and Iraq have devolved into a horror show of human tragedy. And, to exacerbate it, you’ve got America’s fondness for saturation bombing civilians with high explosive.
My father used to say that the history of a time can’t be written until all the bodies are buried. There’s definitely something to that, and the little bits that do peek out often reveal the shape of an underlying mass of buried secrets. It’s enough to turn you into a conspiracy theorist.