WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 – A Pentagon spokesman confirmed today for the first time reports of damage to the Bach Mai Hospital and Gia Lam Airport in Hanoi during heavy air raids last month over North Vietnam but he denied that the damage was either massive or intentional.
All creatures are perpetually in a state of war: each species is born to devour others.
Voltaire by Houdon
I’m going to assume that many (if not most) of you are familiar with Iain Bank’s The Culture, and the naming system of Culture ships.
Internet security is complicated and there are lots of dependencies – usually if you ask an internet security practitioner “is ${this thing} safe?” they’ll tell you “if you’re trying to do ${this} or ${that} then…” and carry on for a half an hour in that vein.
Here’s another one to add to the list of “ideas that won’t happen.” In high school, a friend of mine and I hit upon the idea of writing an illustrated book of “unusual family customs.” Sort of a Martha Stewart idea guide gone horribly wrong: quirky and surrealistic customs that families could enact with great seriousness, raising their kids as though the custom was perfectly normal. In his book The Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman hits on one: the kids in the family are taught that, on presidents’ day, you are supposed to go to school and cosplay your favorite president. Other schoolkids did not understand why the child showed up claiming to be Millard Fillmore.
One fascinating characteristic of the well-indoctrinated ultra-nationalist is they tend to lose their sense of reflexivity. Ultra-nationalism depends on authoritarianism and exceptionalism, so it doesn’t hold up well to challenges against its authority – after all, it wouldn’t have to be authoritarian if it were possible to justify their beliefs. What we wind up with is this weird sort of “what I say, goes, as long as it applies in the direction I want it to.”
“The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.” – George Orwell, 1984
By now, you ought to have heard about A/2017 U1 – a large rock that whipped through our solar system at an odd angle off the plane of the ecliptic, moving so fast that it almost certainly could not have come from within our solar system. [rt]
In order to guard themselves against the enterprises of a haughty Pontiff who desired to reign over kings, and in order to protect their persons from the attacks of the credulous people excited by their priests, several princes of Europe pretended to have received their crowns and their rights from God alone, and that they should account to Him only for their actions.
Your host, Jean Meslier
The first moment where I started to wonder was in 6th or 7th grade social studies. We had a textbook about “geography” which included some geopolitics; a picture on one page of Uncle Sam sitting in a circle with characteristic (even stereotypical) kids of various ethnicities. It wasn’t quite as bad as that the kid from Africa had a bone through his nose – not quite. The caption read “Americans want to be friends with everyone.” And when the page was turned, the picture was of a Red Army soldier in WWII uniform, with a ppsh tommygun held at port arms, “The Soviets want to rule the world.”