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.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
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.
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.
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen! [kipling] [Read more...]
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.
In an earlier posting about “operators” (special forces/CIA) in Libya,[stderr] I posted a picture that I had saved from early in the rebellion there.
… Xi and Putin are trying to achieve a political solution to a political problem. I’m terrified that the US will do something stupid because it’s not the power sitting at the head of the Grownup Table. Actually, the US is mysteriously absent from the Grownup Table. Oh, look, over there in the corner, wearing the “dunce” hat, it’s America!
I know it’s all the fashion, in some circles, to belittle the “mainstream media” for being hard on Donald Trump – but I think the media ought to be more direct and less cautious in its wording.
One of the crucial failures of leadership during the Vietnam War was the way the pentagon managed to reduce a complex political/military/logistical situation down to a discussion about head-count. That allowed the military to focus discussion about the war into a question of head-count: how many dead Vietcong heads did you collect today? How many shiny new American heads did you ship over? How many came back?
Today is the day when the nation pauses to say stupid things about the victims of its pointless imperial wars. A small minority of them, actually.
My dad once told me (I was complaining about ageing) that it’s normal to experience a culture-shift as the people who lived through a time with you start to die off, and things that were facts of your life are now unusual and alien to them. For example, I grew up when there were still Horn and Hardart automats: places you could buy food from big slot machines, sort of a primordial form of fast food.