Warning: War, Death, War Crimes, Atrocities
Recent discussion of bunkers [stderr] reminded me, over and over, about a horrible piece of propaganda I encountered as a child. [Read more…]
Stderr
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Warning: War, Death, War Crimes, Atrocities
Recent discussion of bunkers [stderr] reminded me, over and over, about a horrible piece of propaganda I encountered as a child. [Read more…]
Here’s some more of my fascinating spam – another squint at the underbelly of the American nightmare:
It sounds like the Kurds have been out-maneuvered by the Iraqi regime; then left twisting in the wind by their American backers. Iraqi Abrams M-1 tanks (which are basically invincible against the light vehicles the Kurds have) were the convincing argument – the Iraqis inter-penetrated Kurdish positions in the Kirkuk area, essentially a peaceful “overrun” maneuver – and the Kurds realized that if they offered resistance, they’d be slaughtered.
The JFK assassination archive has been scheduled to be opened since 1992, when George H. W. Bush established a deadline for declassifying them. That is supposed to happen this thursday. Various people are speculating that it will drive conspiracy theorists wild, so I’m going to take full advantage of this opportunity to be very wrong, by making some guesses what we’ll learn.
When you’ve got over half a trillion dollars at stake, people will do or say pretty much anything. So it gets hard to figure out what’s going on when you read headlines in the form of “X is an ongoing disaster” alongside of “great cost-savings achieved via X” for any given X. It’s hard to be both a tremendous success and an ongoing disaster. I am, naturally, referring to the latest news about the F-35 program.
Eventually I will stop making fun of the “tactical” gear mindset. But for now, since I’m stuck in an airport, I’m going to continue to trawl through the justifications in hope of understanding.
When the US invaded Iraq and overthrew the government, we heard a bit about “nation-building” until the establishment discovered it no longer knew how to do that, and/or wasn’t willing to pay the price that it paid rebuilding Germany, Japan, and South Korea. [Read more…]
My posting about the paradox of “self defense” triggered much more response than I expected. [stderr]
Strategy is the process of imagining possible futures and how they come about, then “pruning” back the lines of causality to try to infer what actions will get you there. It’s an active process that stresses a person’s creativity and analytic skills. The hardest part, I believe, is coming up with (and eliminating) endless hypotheticals of everything that could go wrong right now for any given now. This, however, is the essence of strategy.
Warning: War, Death
Administrative note: I made an error attributing the movie and confused a different movie with a release of the same film under a different name. Explanation is [here] – in order to reduce confusion, I have done an edit-pass. If you see comments about how I am talking about the wrong movie, they are correct with respect to the initial version of this posting. Sorry about the confusion!
I don’t know if I have the necessary skill to convey how upsetting this topic is. I wish I could borrow the skills of Orpheus from somewhere, and get other people to watch it, get angry and scared, and – do something. I don’t even know what we can do, trapped as we are in the reality of nationalism and out-of-control militarism.
Threads is about the horrible deaths our political leaders have prepared for us.
If you don’t like spoilers, don’t read any further. But there’s really nothing to spoil. You already know roughly what happens.