Post #432,679
2/20/20 8:12:42 AM
2/20/20 8:12:42 AM
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You understand now why, several years ago, I decided to acquire several firearms?
For the past 34 years I've heard similar rhetoric among my fellow Hoosiers. One manager-type told me a decade ago, "I'm training my son to be a warrior. The Balkanization of our country is underway and I want him to be ready." His son at the time was six years old. Such sentiment as you describe above has been very much mainstream here, in The Heartland™ for at least a decade.
bcnu, Mikem
It's mourning in America again.
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Post #432,680
2/20/20 9:49:36 AM
2/20/20 9:49:36 AM
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Git the Hell outtathere.
Run for the at least marginally civilised strips of land along the coasts.
--
Christian R. Conrad The Man Who (used to think he) Knows Fucking EverythingMail: Same username as at the top left of this post, at iki.fi
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Post #432,681
2/20/20 3:50:27 PM
2/20/20 4:12:23 PM
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There's "No Place to Hide" ..to steal a rather old book-title.
An 'algorithm to parse Chaos' is an oxymoronic phrase. Simply: check out Germany 2-20-20 for a closer-to-Home venue (?) The dis-US is Lousy-with Gunz everywhere/everywhen.
[Nobody EVER-said ~ "Here's how you deal with an IMPENDING 'EXTINCTION EVENT'".] Did anyone? ... (I missed it then).
We so enjoyed the better written dystopian novels ... not so much fun when You're-In ..the perhaps last 'novels' ever to be written, eh?
Meanwhile ..as the first Lily blooms outside--maybe a month+half sooner than for eons--I wonder why?--I find that sanity is restored when one simply does a-day-at-a-time ... 'cause 'Time' is just nature's Way of scamming you that everything isn't happening-at-once, whereas ..Ackshully ... well, you know. ;^>
Edited by Ashton
Feb. 20, 2020, 03:54:41 PM EST
Edited by Ashton
Feb. 20, 2020, 04:12:23 PM EST
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Post #432,683
2/20/20 4:11:51 PM
2/20/20 4:11:51 PM
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“Ameristan”
Neal Stephenson’s most recent novel, The Fall (overall a considerable disappointment, almost as irritating as his previous novel Seveneves), is set in a near-future USA that has not formally disintegrated, but in which those mainly coastal precincts we today style “blue,” along with sundry inland urban centers (Denver, Chicago, Minneapolis, etc) are connected by the skein of Interstates running through the savage hinterlands in which guns, Jesus and meth prevail, and the social (dis)order has devolved into fortified compounds and warlordism that the national authority has apparently neither the inclination nor the power to oversee. The author calls this vast acreage “Ameristan,” and its depiction was the most persuasive part of an otherwise forgettable book.
[While I have your attention, BTW, let me recommend William Gibson’s most recent novels, The Peripheral and Agency, which riff on an interesting notion of time travel (2136 London, following an only vaguely described slow-motion apocalypse, has discovered a means of communicating with the, or rather a, past via telepresence), and which describe a near-future not unlike Stephenson’s. I think we should pay attention to these guys.]
cordially,
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Post #432,685
2/21/20 2:22:25 AM
2/21/20 2:24:10 AM
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Tail wags dog, again?
(Should handy personal-armament sales go ^up^ in Germany during this fate-filled and Fact-free year)
Surely a pfennig-for-thoughts everywhere shall be.. former Fsscists take note of the popularity/success of bump-stock massacrees in the Grand Ol' Party's adoption of their earlier allegiance: here, in the distraught-US's attempts ot Make Amerika Grate Again, that nostalgic trek-back ..via their very icon: MAGA.
Imitation Is the sincerest form of Flattery, eh?
Today.. the Fifty-'states'; Tomorrow: the remaining couple-dozen? after the Southrun-leaning 'states' secede over their right to have the New Friendly-nukes under States' Rights control--as in the good-ol Days. (It's only Faire..)
Over, out ...and down for the count.
Edited by Ashton
Feb. 21, 2020, 02:24:10 AM EST
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Post #432,686
2/21/20 6:06:33 AM
2/21/20 6:06:33 AM
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pp ~200 -- ~250/300, IIRC.
I found it -- the whole book, not the "Ameristan" bit, which I also rated as the best part -- far more annoying than Seveneves, which I thought on the whole quite OK (though maybe a bit rushed towards the end).
Two reflections on Fall's "Ameristan":
1) "To facebook" as a transitive verb: "The whole region had been facebooked back to the Bronze Age". Nice.
2) Those "Leviticans"... The way he describes the theology of this particular branch of Meity -- haven't they basically just reverted to Judaism?
--
Christian R. Conrad The Man Who (used to think he) Knows Fucking EverythingMail: Same username as at the top left of this post, at iki.fi
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Post #432,693
2/21/20 5:35:03 PM
2/21/20 5:35:03 PM
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yabbut they are allowed to eat shrimp
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
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Post #432,697
2/21/20 9:59:00 PM
2/21/20 9:59:00 PM
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Seveneves
He did his physics homework. A spacecraft took its own sweet time, consistent with angular momentum, to make its round. Credit for that.
His obvious nasty “Hillary Clinton” president didn’t go over well here, even before the last election. Stephenson’s facile libertarianism has always irritated me.
The second part exhausted the credit the XXI century sequence accumulated, and was utterly implausible genetically and in every other particular.
I hated the book.
cordially,
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Post #432,707
2/22/20 8:35:23 AM
2/22/20 8:35:23 AM
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Oh, she was supposed to be Hillary? I never got that. Are you sure?
Or are you over-sensitively reading any "bitch" character as the author's take on Clinton?
--
Christian R. Conrad The Man Who (used to think he) Knows Fucking EverythingMail: Same username as at the top left of this post, at iki.fi
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Post #432,711
2/22/20 10:25:30 AM
2/22/20 10:25:30 AM
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Re: Oh, she was supposed to be Hillary? I never got that. Are you sure?
Not certain, but this was also the impression taken by others. I’m not aware of ever having taken any other character in fiction as a stand-in for HRC apart from the candidate’s wife in the 1996 novel Primary Colors, where the correspondence was all-but explicit.
cordially,
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Post #432,696
2/21/20 9:53:24 PM
2/21/20 9:53:24 PM
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idea is gaining traction
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
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Post #432,735
2/24/20 8:13:30 AM
2/24/20 8:13:30 AM
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Is there a RWNJ outlet you don't read?
bcnu, Mikem
It's mourning in America again.
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