By Now This Should be No Surprise

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?

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Like Hitting Yourself in the Face With a Hammer

I recently listened to the audiobook version of a series of lectures and Q&A with Noam Chomsky. If you have problems with being depressed into immobility by world politics and economics, I don’t recommend it. This is a sort-of review of the audiobook, with some comments by me and some quotes, and I plan to, over time, post a few passages from it.

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I Suppose Corruption Is Inevitable

Lacking a better term for it, I mentally think of my deep suspicion regarding civilization as “anti-social” because it is, literally, a distrust of society verging on the belief that maybe civilization will turn out to be a bad idea in the long run. In my darker moments I think that civilization may be a great big hack that was perpetrated by the power-hungry, and those seeking luxurious lives. It’s as if they invented the idea of “lets be a ‘people’ so that they could be king of ‘a people’ instead of just layabout greedy thugs.

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The World’s Governments Continue To Fuck Around

Mario Savio:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels … upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

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Afghanistan: The Endless War of Finger-Pointing

Success has many parents, who have PR machines behind them and trumpet it to the skies. Failure is, as they say, an orphan. In the case of Afghanistan, like Iraq, the war party has diligently flicked the remaining scraps of egg from its face and declared everything is the current administration’s fault (for doing exactly what the previous administration was planning to do).

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Corruption

The US political system is incredibly corrupt. There are perhaps a few mere millionaires in congress, but they’re the tip of an iceberg made of shit – it’s their children or spouses that are grabbing money hand over fist. I remember back in the 90s when the US media was all a’cry about the corruption of Saddam Hussein’s children, but they were ham-fisted amateurs compared to the Washington set.

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Nasty Denouements

A dozen years ago, I read Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and that provoked a lengthy peripheral interest in the problem of using legalisms to deal with the unexpectedly nasty monsters that occasionally crop up in humanity. As a moral nihilist [*] the nazi elite seemed tractable to me: they were just a bunch of power-drunk assholes who managed to gain power over a country with a great military, and they went on a great rampage, doing whatever got them off.

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