You guys should come to Britain. Then you would know what bad and stupid politics was. Have you heard of the doctor who was on the list of the Conservative (please note) parliamentary candidates but was suspended because she retweeted a picture of Hitler with a quotation of his in which he explained that the Nazi party was a socialist party? No? Well, here we are. Enjoy.
Month: February 2013
150 Years Later
…people are still writing songs about the Civil War.
Josephine, by Rory Lee Feek
The song is based on actual letters written by Confederate soldier J W Robison to his wife Josephine.
I am reminded of something Connie Willis said:
Because the Civil War isn’t over. Its images, dreamlike, stay with us — young boys lying face-down in cornfields and orchards, and Robert E. Lee on Traveller. And Lincoln, dead in the White House, and the sound of crying.
The Civil War disturbs us, all these long years after, troubling our sleep. Like a cry for help, like a warning, like a dream. And we pore over it, trying to break the code, its meaning just out of reach.
Glad This Didn’t Happen During the Cold War…
I’ve been studiously ignoring the news but this penetrated my anti-media barrier thanks to my spouse:
Meteor explodes over central Russia, 500 people hurt
My first thought was, “Thank God this didn’t happen during the Cold War!” The Soviets were so batsh*t paranoid that they would have started with the assumption it was some kind of attack just like when they shot down the Korean airliner.
For all of the doom and gloom today about terrorism, global warming (or whatever apocalypse is fashionable this week) young folks should remember that no problem we face today was as serious and as dangerous as Cold War balance of terror. We faced the very real prospect that within the space of a mere hour, every major city and piece of infrastructure in the developed world, the communist and (it would turn out) India, would have been utterly destroyed along with most of the people inside them. Civilization would have ended for centuries. It would take just one hour for it all to end.
The post-Cold War revelation of just how ready the Soviets were to empty the silos, and how they almost did once out of shear delusion, are easily the scariest thing I ever read. The world could have ended just because a bunch of political zealots caught, in what was effectively a absolutist religious delusion, could have destroyed civilization for absolutely no valid reason at all, not even a reason valid in their ideology.
The Soviet Union would turn out to have been an utterly militarized state whose ruling caste was totally convinced not only that America spent its every waking moment trying to destroy them but that the “scientific” doctrine of Marxist historical inevitability made an eventual American attack as certain as the predicted orbits of the planets. Leftists scoffed at Cold War CIA estimates that the Soviet Union spent 20% of its GNP on the military. The CIA was in fact wrong. The Soviets actually spent 40% of their GNP on the military. Basically WWII, never ended for them and the Soviet Union was a military with the bare minimum civilian sector necessary to support it. They thought themselves constantly at war.
All the Cold War era arguments in the West itself about the West’s role in creating the Cold War turned out to be utterly moot.
Respect Her Authoritah
…don’t you dare even think about cutting her allowance.
Nancy Cartman-Pelosi thinks it would be disrespectful to cut Congressional salaries because it would diminish the dignity of lawmakers’ jobs.
“I think we should respect the work we do,” she said in a rather strangely-worded statement to reporters. “I think it’s necessary for us to have the dignity of the job that we have rewarded.”
What a bizarre statement. The fact that someone’s income may fluctuate doesn’t detract from the dignity of their job. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon just had his annual bonus cut by millions of dollars. Commissioned salespeople often have their incomes fluctuate downward as well as upward. Hourly worker have incomes that depend directly on how many hours of work are available. Small businesspeople and investors at whatever scale have incomes that are highly variable.
Not everyone is a tenured professor or “nonprofit” executive or civil servant with guaranteed employment and guaranteed income. This doesn’t mean their work has any less worth or dignity.
Good grief.
link via Common Sense & Wonder
History Became Legend, Legend Became Myth…
(A reprise post from SSDB archives – about the legendary ‘teflon man’ broadcaster who shall be nameless here, although anyone who served in certain units will recognize the legend of whom I speak.)
And some things which should not have been forgotten… Have not been, because they are either funny or excellent cautionary tales. The Teflon Man, for instance: he bestrode the small world of military broadcasting, providing a rich legacy of horrible gaffes, cringe-inducing miscalculations and antics which reflected no credit whatever upon the unit to which he was attached. Spend more than a couple of years as an NCO in military broadcasting, and you will know everyone, or know of everyone, and the Teflon Man was a legend, like Bigfoot or Elvis, because nothing ever seemed to stick. He had more lives than the wily coyote, bouncing back time and time again from incidents that would have seen any other military broadcaster sent back to civilian life, working the overnight TV board shift for the last-rated station in Sheboygan or Bakersfield.