Google Maps already provides the user with the option to avoid motorways and tolls. Perhaps Google Maps should also allow the user to avoid wars?
Source: Please Don’t Kill Me, Google Maps
Nah, the big goog says “fuck you”. If you have to die to make some asshole VP look good on the term sheet, you’ll fucken die.
google devlopers don’t care about you Read More »
While Wellerstein emphasizes that this was a carefully planned nuclear test, with relatively straightforward calculations about how far away the bombers and observation planes needed to be for safety, the pilots of those planes understandably felt some all-too-human trepidation. “There’s these great accounts from some of the pilots of observation planes who had to fly towards the cloud to get readings and things,” Wellerstein told Ars. “One of the guys said, ‘I did it. And it was the most terrifying event in my life.’ And the other guy said, ‘I’m sorry, I wimped out. I turned around, I couldn’t fly towards this monstrous mushroom cloud. I just couldn’t do it at the last minute.'”
Source: Revisiting the “Tsar Bomba” nuclear test | Ars Technica
The people who saw that detonation learned first-hand what terror for the planet is.
The Caesar of Bombs Read More »
The little-publicized helicopter scandal was one of many investigated by John Sopko, who, as the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, has served as the Cassandra of the Afghan war. Since Congress created his office in 2012 he has been diligently relating details of the colossal waste associated with the war in handsome full-color annual reports, but with little effect. ‘It was a disaster ready to happen, and it happened,’ he told me a few years into the job. ‘We wasted a lot of money. It wasn’t that people were stupid, and it wasn’t that people didn’t care; it’s just the system almost guarantees failure.’
Source: How the US military got rich from Afghanistan – The Spectator World
Next up, the price of heroin will go up internationally until the Taliban gets all its ducks in a row. Then the world will be flooded with opium and its price will crash. The entire time other drugs will take its place, including fentanyl.
That’s just on the drug front. There’s also arms sales to training camps that are yet to be established.
War is about Money. Simple as that. Read More »
It’s easy to speculate that the Greeks avoided sieges for as long as they could because they had the sense to realise how nasty things could get. The ancient and medieval world was under no illusions about the misery of sieges. The Mongols made that common knowledge into a military tool. When they wanted a city, they offered it three chances to surrender; three refusals, and the city would be razed to the ground and the inhabitants massacred.
Meanwhile, modern warmakers don’t have the sense to stop when they should, lacking a sense of how nasty things get before they get worse.
A quick read on the art of the siege Read More »