Warning: War, death, violence
I just finished reading Mark Bowden’s Huế, 1968. Since it’s history, I won’t warn you of any spoilers.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
Warning: War, death, violence
I just finished reading Mark Bowden’s Huế, 1968. Since it’s history, I won’t warn you of any spoilers.
Whenever we read an account of the beginning of WWI it’s necessary for the historian to first lay out the landscape of interlocking defense treaties that turned Europe into a sort of Venn diagram of fantasy militarism. To me, it’s a reminder of the great Avalon Hill game Diplomacy which we played in my high school Military History Club (AKA: D&D club) – everyone secretly negotiating with everyone else against everyone else. For Europe, the results were grim, and I needn’t go into them.
I think that the chart is probably conservative; there are a lot of undeclared conflicts that look a lot like war to the victims but aren’t because it’s not convenient to use the W-word.
The CIA regularly deals with nasty people. Probably, it’s got something to do with the fact that they are nasty people, too.
Apparently Stanislav Petrov died in May, but the news simply didn’t get around.
They have fought, the bravest, for thousands of years; their record of defeat and victory is mixed but they’ve stood with the desperate, charged gloriously to victory, and – like all warriors – humped gear from one place to another.
I wrote a piece back in November of last year, about “Inner Dynamics of Revolutions.” [stderr] And, as I watch the news today, I realize I was being much too oblique. So, let me try again; warning, I’m going to talk about current US politics.
I never thought Rex Tillerson would seem diplomatic. Our national exercise in Overton Window-shifting has had some results: we are settling for mind-bogglingly foolish because it looks good compared to babbling batshit.
The US’ new sanctions on N Korea are expected to cut its international trade by up to 1/3.
72 years ago, the US advanced the state of the art in war atrocities by detonating a 20 kiloton nuclear weapon in the air over the city of Hiroshima.