ivan

while i didn't enjoy the text that much, the expereince of reading 2 Titties was great - i was illegally squatting in the sheltering brush near camp 4 w/ nothing but a small bag and a big bottle, crawling w/ skeeters n' anticipating the next day of bottle

december: tank by patrick wright - a beautifully succinct title, albeit a far too common one, for a thorough history of a simple concept: a big buncha metal meant to smash whatever might have the misforturne to run against its treads wright's a damned englishmen, a race so ostentatiously intelligent it leaves you needing to take a turn of 30 minutes or so of fox news soon thereafter in order to defuse the noxious spirits that accompany such high-handed n' haughty language - in spite of his race though, i actually found the book quite charming, though on several occasions, feeling overwhelmed by bullshit, i resorted to rooseveltian speed-reading and only read topic sentences for page after page it's not a military history per se, though clearly that's the skeleton of the thing - more a semantic tour de tank, considering the evolution of the concept of tank as reflected not so much on the battlefield as in human culture, art and history - the whole jungian thang really turns out patton was really the merest tip of the ice-berg in terms of the tendency of tankers to be bat-shit crazy - j.f.c. fuller the bastard father of a would-be brazen killer, and holy shiite muslims, that boy was a puzzle - a foppish intellectual, who before the great war was a grand poobah in the church of aleister crowley (my favorite k2 mountaineer), fuller went from preaching the deep-deep crazy of magick to, after the epoch-announcing battle of cambrai, singing the world a siren tune about the transformative impact of the tank - wierd little bitch that he was, he refused a posting that would have allowed him to put his brazen ideas into practice and drifted off into being little more than a deranged imam belting out bullshit from the loftiest of towers - he inspired many a german and russian and american and israeli tanker though, and so the myth grew - for his part, by ww2 he was a confirmed british-nazi (shit, those fuckers were even worse than the bland kraut-variety!) and spent those grand days under house arrest or some-such not sure the library's gonna take this one back - my supposedly sealed coffee cup exploded next to it in my school bag one day and turned half the pages a deep and rudish brown - if those fucks down in the league office give me any slack for it though, i'll point out it's a book about an ugly, nasty, beat-up thing, and so a virginal quality in the tome itself never could do - really they should pay ME for the coffee this poor boy sacrificed for the cause

if every anti-semite in the 19th century had been expunged the jews really would have been running the whole world, 'cuz there would have been nobody else left i have a fig for dickens - even my favorite of his, tale of 2 shitties, i found too maudlin for my rare-rare-rarified taste - i learned the other year that he often threw conniption fits over damned yankees illegally copying his books and paying no commissions - we were the china of the day, and lord the englishman hates a coolie

'cuz he was a fag or a child-molester or both?

never read "rise and fall of the 3rd reich" but growing up i had a vhs copy of the video version which i musta watched a million times - one of many small steps to becoming a history teacher...

used to be you had to read them books to remember the madness of xenophobia run wild - seems lately you can just read the frontpage?

yuck a minute book there, is night - a couple years ago i had the pleasure of meeting a woman who spoke at my school who grew up in the same village as wiesel - she ended up w/ him at auschwitz too - said he was a grumpy bastard even before then

perfection woulda been a 8/7

worth more than a black man's life, least as far as the census-man said so, circa 1859, eh?

yeah, but you keep taking right-of-center stances on positions so Ivan, naturally, must contradict you i agree w/ people when i think they're right- occasionally The Others do get to be right too, QED

that's why the fascists at the aclu have a problem w/ it, right?

i agree w/ the first statement but not the second. The past century of presidential elections indicates whoever the republicans pick has a much greater than 50/50 shot of winning. romney would have been a shoe-in if he'd run in 2016 against clinton (and i woulda loved to have seen the dog crate on top of the white house )

You can't get a gun if you are a convicted felon, have a mental health history, have a domestic disturbance restriction order, and any number of other parameters. The second amendment, as SCOTUS has outline and just last week upheld by refusing to review a gun restriction law, is not universal. If Congress votes in a law that says if your on the No Fly list -- it IS just that simple. The logic that you are unsafe enough to jump on a SW flight to Vegas but ok to pickup the latest semi-automatic with a few hundred rounds of ammo is, well, astonishing. it sounds like ya'll are in something like agreement - folks shouldn't be able to buy a gun if they're not trusted to fly either, but the process of deciding who's on that list needs to be just (and lord knows there must be many devils hiding in all those details) the constitutional scholars will no doubt remind us that you have an expressly granted right to bear arms but no such specific right to fly, thus the later is far easier to tamper w/ than the former

i don't want to bash the donald too much - him getting the republican nomination is probably the best chance of keeping at least a nominal liberal in the big house, no?

kinda like isis in that way really - his intention is to spread madness and insanity - they should do a video together or team up like superman n' friends

“At the end of the day, Barack Obama has turned out to be a completely incompetent commander-in-chief. He doesn't listen to sound military advice. Leaving Iraq too soon led to the rise of ISIL, and John Kerry, his secretary of state, is a completely delusional man,” -- Sen. Lindsey Graham yup, if only we could get the military to start calling all the shots, everything would get waaaay better, 'cuz they've never been wrong 'bout nothing! keeping shit to shoe-level is about the best you can ask for any president i reckon - obama's done that at least, though i've no doubt there's them 'round here who'd disagree.

agreed. funny, just finished a book today that was written 15 years ago - in it a critic of the army whined something to the effect that "american politics have gotten so stupid and commericial - pretty soon the race is going to pit donald trump vs dolly parton" - guess the guy was half right at least?

random thought - the lord's resistance army is currently doing unspeakable horror in the depths of africa, and ostensibly in the name of christianity - why don't we bar all christains from entering america until we figure that shit out?

You've alluded to ISIS motives before and I have to reply this time. Back in the W/post 9/11 days a lot of (mostly right-wing) folks were saying "they hate us because of our freedoms and way of life" and other (mostly left-wing) folks were calling bullshit on that. We don't know why they do what they want or what their "battle plan" is. Honestly, I'd be surprised if it is much more than "kill as many infidels as you can, cause chaos". If we stop accepting immigrants or refuges they can take advantage of that in some way. If we keep taking them they can take advantage of that (infiltrate, seed cells). I don't think they care or plan for either way. They'll adjust as needed my gut feeling is these boys are like most assholes w/ guns - they want to carve out a space for themselves to do as they wish and enjoy being the top dogs, ideally w/ a nifty apocalyptic ideology to support it all still, like the anarchists before them, isis needs a "propaganda of the word" to tie their dipshit thing together and attract fresh blood - that "word" is that the whole world is at war w/ muslims and all muslims must get off the fence and choose a side - the west showing itself hostile to muslims, regardless of their individuality, can only shove the billion plus of them towards our enemy am i the only southerner here? the whole thing reminds me of the wildly racist uncle remus tale of brer rabbit and the tar baby...

carter was under intense pressure to free what, like nearly a hundred americans, seized after a violation of one of antiquity's most ancient protocols (the inviolability of ambassadors), and after more than a year? his lack of forceful response was, as you know, one of the chief issues causing his defeat at the hands of reagan. his hope was clearly that this action against iranian citizens in the usa would create pressure that would make military inaction necessary. what do you think trump would propose if, say, mexico was currently holding 100 american embassy personnel for more than 15 minutes? does the "bomb the shit out of them" mentality that extends far beyond trump's campaign really have much ground to stand on in critiquing a slow ratcheting up of diplomatic tensions? your suggestion of naming particular nation-states as worthy of suspicion is less crazy and more in keeping w/ our history that said, both actions directly support isis's battle-plan and should therefore be avoided would you say, from the perspective of a 100 years, that it was a wise idea for the usa to deport italians and italian-americans willy-nilly out of fear of anarchism? that the mass incarceration of japanese-americans in ww2 improved our safety or moved our national narrative of the "great shining city on a hill" any further?

answer: no Hitler, eh? shall we draw a venn diagram comparing trump and carter's proposal? carter proposed citizens of a well-defined nation-state currently engaged in hostilities against the usa be denied entry into the country (with an appeals/exemption process) trump proposes a nebulous blanket ban of all humans fitting a gray ethnic label or constitutionally-protected religious conviction, neither of which has an official political leadership that has declared war on us (or even exists, for that matter), w/ no sort of process to challenge the denial either it's wierd to see someone on the right accuse carter of being too forceful in responding to the challenge of iran - keerist, ya'll fall over yourselves laughing at how much of a ineffectual mr. rogers kinda pussy he was in dealing w/ them, no?

i can't speak for the ACLU so perhaps the resident Hairy Hermit can weigh in i suspect them nice fellers at the 'U though aren't per se opposed to the concept of a no-fly list so much as the manner in which said list is compiled and kept and challengeable - i imagine to a good extent too that you're arguing just to argue - i doubt you'd want a guy the fbi has monitored hanging out on isis-websites and posting repeatedly on social media about the awesomeness of that organization to be able to either board a plane or buy an ar-15 ('specially when folks up-thread were arguing said people should be executed w/o even a trial?) maybe it's just a word game, but you're not being "dis-armed" in theory here, you're being "denied more arms than you had already"

answer: no

sometime bitches gotta get got

dunno, the trump's setting that particuliar bar pretty high these days, no? holy sheeit, is he like, the gay love child of george wallace and barry goldwater, possibly wet-nursed by moe, larry n' curly?