Hanna Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism has been widely quoted, lately. To say it’s interesting is an understatement, but I have long felt that she’s over-generalizing the commonalities between Stalinism and Hitlerism.
This one is mind-bogglingly stupid. But the story serves as a good example of what I mean when I say that computer security can only get so good, because the whole ecosystem is so thoroughly undermined that any effort to secure it can be over-topped by the attackers, with minimal additional effort.
WARNING: Violence
Surveillance videos of the bombing in Nashville are cropping up from all over. I’m able to keep a certain detachment from what’s happening by focusing my interest on the explosion and its effects, and hypothesizing how it was arranged.
Would you like to see a glimpse into the kind of embarrassing shit Americans are going to come up with as the climate crisis continues to bite? My prediction is: if you think our response to COVID-19 was lethally stupid, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Some mornings, when your alarm clock fires off, you just roll over and slap the “snooze” button. If you do that long enough, you can get quite good at it; there have been mornings when I hit the “snooze” button 15 or more times in a row, pushing back my wake-up time by as much as 2 hours. I used to know someone who claimed that they could sleep-walk through their morning status meeting, effectively grabbing several extra hours of sleep.
The last month has been eye-opening, indeed. Already a non-fan of representative democracy, I’ve learned that I was insufficiently cynical – when you have a system that has been designed to be corrupt, it’s rife with holes to allow corruption; such a system cannot withstand adverse gamespersonship. It is built-in.
Are you tired of this stuff? I’m sick of it, personally. It’s depressing. I feel like I’ve been wandering around blissfully ignoring how horrible nearly half of my fellow citizens and neighbors happen to be. To be fair, since I live in deep “Trump country” it’s more than half. What’s wrong with these people? [I actually have a fairly good idea but we don’t have time or inclination to do a class analysis of American history]
I’ve been a bit quiet and distant lately, or I feel that I have.
Nuclear weapons have now been banned.
In the midst of political uncertainty and financial chaos resulting from a pandemic, the pentagon has been busily soldiering on, throwing vast amounts of money toward whatever it wants.
This year, there are Biden/Harris signs; it’s not all Trump, Trump, Trump.