[Content Warning: Crash, Personal injury not visible, F-35]
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
[Content Warning: Crash, Personal injury not visible, F-35]
Looks like the Europe edition of “Syria, the overthrow.”
There has been many megabytes of pixels spilled, writing about the US exit from Afghanistan. The tragedy, if there is one, is that the US knew for decades that it was eventually going to have to leave, but hung around spending money and ruining lives, because of fear of embarrassment. That’s right: the response to fear of embarrassment was to embarrass ourselves fucking more. Brilliant.
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.
Commentariat(tm) Underwater Obstreperousness Agent Patrick Slattery sent me this story, to brighten my day. Because, unlike some of you, I probably didn’t pay for it. The Brits, apparently have figured out what to do with their F-35s.
The COP26 meetings are over and they turned out exactly as expected. There were some particularly horrifying moments, such as when Nobel Price recipient Barack Obama, who earlier said:
“You wouldn’t always know it, but it [oil production] went up every year I was president,” he said to applause. “That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas – that was me, people.”
… decided to lecture everyone about how bad fossil fuels are. You can’t make this shit up.
As I predicted, the aspirational goal of +1.5C is in the toilet: coal and oil producing countries are talking about “tailing off” new production, meaning “we’re going to keep drilling and digging and we’ll tail it off in a decade or two once it’s no longer our problem because we’re old people and we’re going to slide into our graves and leave you kids holding the bag.” +2.5C is the new aspirational goal and, frankly, I think humanity will blow that one, too.
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?
Gosh, the people in Washington sure do like to lie. And the supine media (who want to think of themselves as “watchdogs”) (more like “watch chinchillas”) report what they are given in “talking points” memos.
In case you’ve been dead and buried for the last couple of months, the current big kerfuffle in Washington is a bunch of play-acting about how we haven’t got enough money for this or that useful social program. And, as always, there’s another social program that goes unmentioned: the defense budget. It’s a social program, right? It’s just oriented toward destroying societies.