279) The cost of feeding the dogs of war (and the utter imbecility of the decision-makers behind it)
Imagine that you wanted to personally fund a $10 billion [war], and you make, say, $80,000 per year. You would have needed to start working ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE THOUSAND YEARS AGO, about 60,000 years BEFORE stone-tool-using Homo sapiens were interbreeding with Neanderthals, and you would have had to save every single penny.
271) Ukraine vs. America: What side are YOU on?
Before 1994, Ukraine had the THIRD LARGEST nuclear arsenal in the world. It gave up its nukes for promises of protection, the internationally-agreed-upon guarantee that Ukraine would retain its territorial sovereignty.
228) Resisting Authoritarianism: It is time to get more involved
Look back at yourself someday as a goddamn hero, and be proud of what you did when the dark times came.
219) "They're eating the cats..."
Remember, there are no small number of people in the United States, even members of Congress, who believe in the QAnon fantasy-world. They believe that the Democrats are controlled by a Satanic cabal, who kidnap and torture babies in order to extract a chemical from their brains while they are tortured, which gives immortality.
78) Magic, Motorcycles, and Mandelbrot: Part 2 - Motorcycles
There’s a hungry-ghost kind of thing that happens with the exertion of power. You start to feel more entitled to exert power, because after all, you are pretty smart to have gotten all this power in the first place, and you start to depreciate “the other,” assuming more and more that other people just don’t have the same perspective as you, the same depth of understanding. They “don’t get it.” So, maybe you still need them as minions, to carry out your bidding, but you don’t really need people questioning your decisions anymore….
13) I put Donald Trump in the White House
As the ‘elites’ — the progressives, the highly educated, the celebs, the newspapers, the cultural genius-figures like Stephen Hawking and Noam Chomsky, etc. — increasingly came out against Trump, disagreeing with his ideas but also emphasizing his seemingly awful and indeed, terrifying nature as a human being, what they/we were doing was building our own WALL, a wall between “us” (the enlightened, smart progressives) and “them” (the bigoted deplorables).
And all of the people on the Trump side of that wall — how do you think they reacted to being told they were idiots and assholes?