Whoa what

Low blow I understand but what the fuck is up with your hair, friend?

The premise is sound enough: let's take a day to remember those who fought, and in many cases died, to protect our homeland, our communities, and our way of life. My father, for instance, was an infantryman in General Patton's Third Army, and fought at The Bulge and the Siegfried Line. The enemy he faced was perhaps the most profoundly evil force in human history, Nazi Germany. My father survived the war and is now in his 90th year of life, but many of his comrades were not so lucky. Do they not deserve the honor and remembrance of a grateful nation? Of course they do.

But what about the other wars -- wars fought not to defend anyone's home or loved ones, but to rob other peoples of their lands, resources, or sovereignty?

>being this stupid
Yes I'm sure the Germans were aware of how evil they were. They definitely weren't just calling themselves the good guys and the British/Americans/Russians/whatever the invaders.

How are the men and women who fight in these wars much different from the German soldiers my father fought? And if we honor such veterans, what about the 100,000+ Iraqi and Afghan civilians and as many as as three million Vietnamese who died at their hands? If Americans killed more Indochinese civilians than Pol Pot, one of the most infamous mass killers of the twentieth century, how is our celebration of Veterans' Day much different from Japan's Yasukuni Shrine, which honors the soldiers and sailors who died in that country's wars of aggression?

Just take the day off and shut up for real.

...the fifth of November, the gunpowder treason and plot.
I know of no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.

What might the world be like had Guy Fawkes succeeded in blowing up Parliament and King James I/VI? 

Does anyone else wonder why Americans celebrate the foiled attempt of an English terrorist to overthrow monarchy? 
Outside of, you know, V for Vendetta and general internet idiocy.
In general Americans should be in favor of Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot yet the famous nursery rhyme kind of takes the opposite approach.

I hate making decisions when I am feeling intense emotion. I almost always make the wrong choice.

I only make decisions while angry.

In the spring of 1979, as I prepared to graduate from college, I applied for a job at the NSA. I went to Fort Meade, Maryland, where they were headquartered, for an interview. Then I heard nothing from them for about a year, by which time my career aspirations had taken a different direction. They asked me back for a second interview, but I told them I was no longer interested.

1979 you graduated college--
I was -8 at that time--
and here you are posting on Dreamwidth.
Where did you go so horribly wrong with your life, friend?

I've used a succession of phones including two Blackberries and my current Mororola Razr, and I've hated every one of them. Last night I plugged in my phone to charge and went to bed. This morning I had to go to NH, and among the things I took with me was the phone. When I got to my destination, I noticed that it was only 30% charged, and during the course of the day that dropped to 15% and then zero. This thing does not have a replaceable battery, and it is less than a year old.

It's also inconvenient to use, and things like passwords are impossible to type reliably by anyone with fingers larger than a small child's. And every few months it gets a software "update" that makes it even less convenient; the first one took away my ability to connect to my computer with a USB cable, and the latest one made file transfers via Bluetooth a major chore.

If these things are supposed to be the wave of the future, why do they leave me longing for a Morse code key?

This editorial brought to you by some yahoo.
IF THESE THINGS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE WHY DO THEY LEAVE ME LONGING FOR MORSE CODE KEY?
A HUE HUE HUE HUE HUE HUE

At church today our minister described his Boston Marathon run, the cheers and encouragement he got from spectators along the route, including a group of parishioners camped out at the church, the delightful weather of last Monday, his feeling of triumph as he crossed the finish line, turning to wait for his wife, who was also running, and then... the explosions, the bedlam, people running to help the injured, two hours of anxious searching for his wife, and a tearful reunion. I wish I had recorded it.

Ok.
Must suck living in Boston.

Every time I log into LiveJournal, I get an email entitled "Login to LiveJournal from unrecognized location".

Unrecognized location? The IP address is always the same, and I rarely log in from any other. What's the matter with these people?

Considering this is Dreamwidth I think you might have other problems.

I am an agnostic. I do not claim to know if there are no Gods, one God, or seventy Gods.

But I do sing in a church choir, and after church when I got in my car, I turned on WHRB. They were broadcasting the service from Memorial Church, and I heard a beautiful pefformance of Thomas Tallis's "If Ye Love Me (Keep My Commandments)". That's an anthem for Pentecost, not the first Sunday in Advent. It's six months out of season. It's like singing Christmas carols in June.

I don't know why that bothers me, but it does.

Must be nice having nothing at all to worry about in life.

Somebody on dailykos.com asked whether a sustainable human presence on Earth is possible under capitalism. I remarked that capital is like yeast; it wants to keep gobbling up resources until it drowns in its own waste, and in the age of "globalization" no government in the world is strong enough to stop it.

Whoaaaaa.
Capitalism is like yeast.
Deep.

One of the things I've come to realize is that nothing, no matter how well or long established, can last forever. The Soviet Union was a great power in 1985, an unassailable fact to be reckoned with since time immemorial, yet all the Party's tanks, ships, and nuclear weapons couldn't hold it together, and it would be gone in six short years.

This is totally how history works. Shit just collapses and is gone forever into the void.
Soviet Russia was a like a clean shit where you don't have to wipe. Just one and done.

There are more descendants of Germans in the United States than descendants of English, yet we speak English not German.

Presumably, we speak English because the English spoke English. But unless I misremember, Britain was the only major province of the Roman empire in which a Germanic language came to be generally spoken, most of the former western provinces retaining a Latin-derived language despite invasion and conquest by Franks, Lombards, Goths, or other Germanic peoples.

>England
>major Roman holding
OK.

The Visigothic kingdom of Spain lasted from the fifth century until the early eighth, when it fell to Arabs; yet Spain retains its Romance languages today and no trace of Gothic survives. Yet in Britain, Latin was replaced quickly by English,

Well after Rome was on its decline--
Also Britain never "replaced" Latin as its main language because Latin was never the main language of England.
Maybe stop talking about Rome now plz before you keep embarrassing yourself.

and not even three centuries of rule by French-speakers after the Norman conquest would change that.

Yeah, you know. When English was replaced by French.
That's why England and America speak French now.
Do you proofread this shit at all?

In the east, where the empire survived the era of Germanic incursions, Greek not Latin became the dominant language in the areas that were not lost to the Arab conquests of the seventh century. But Iran, which fell to the Arabs at the same time, still speaks Persian.

Yet in one eastern Roman province -- Dacia -- the Latin language survived to become modern Romanian, a Romance island surrounded by Slavs and Magyars.

Weird, huh?

Yes. Greek had a resurgence in the East.
The Greeks stopped speaking Greek and picked up Latin only to pick Greek back up when Rome declined--
are you fucking joking?
Rome always worked with two dominant languages. Greek and Latin.
So if I'm to understand this yahoo's post correctly Latin was replaced by modern English which was replaced by modern French in England and Greek had a revival a la Hebrew in the early ADs--
Jesus Christ, buddy.
Read a fucking book sometime.

Why, in the middle of yet another global panic, as the economy continues to unravel, is Barack Obama vacationing in Martha's Vineyard?

Perhaps, Mr. President, you should try your hand at the fiddle. It would help drown out the noise all those annoying Romans are making as they watch their houses burn.

Nero didn't fiddle while Rome burned as the fiddle wasn't invented ye--

oh right, sorry.

Thought we were still on the topic of being smug and wrong about Roman history at the same time.

So far, I'm unimpressed. Both SSD's in my laptop are now unreliable after three years of use. I've ordered a new SSD, and in the meantime am trying to see if I can use a Flash drive as a stopgap.

But so far, it's looking like old fashioned mechanical disk drives are better. They are cheaper, more reliable, and last longer. I wouldn't buy another SSD right now if my laptop could take a conventional drive.

>letting packed-in disk sweepers sweep your shit every week

WHY DO MY SSDs BREAK AFTER A WEEK

I guarantee this is what is happening.

You gotta turn the defragger off, bro.

Take care of your fragments yourself like an adult.

You get pretty pretentious about technology and history. You can swing it.

I learned that in 1985, 75% of a UMass Boston undergraduate student's tuition was paid by the state, while today the state pays only about 25%. Increasingly, UMB students come from households earning at least $85,000 to $100,000 a year. About 1,200 of them live in luxury waterfront apartments immediately adjacent to the campus. They probably pay $2,000 to $3,000 a month in rent.

Are we moving back toward the pre-World War II era when college was accessible only to a moneyed elite? If so, this is surely another consequence of the tearing up of the Roosevelt-era social contract since 1980 by the special interests and their (mostly, but not exclusively) Republican hired guns.

>social contract

>The Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Thirteen

What's it like being this delusional? 

It amazes me to see immense cuts looming in government social programs that help poor and middle class people while the super-rich are rewarded with tax cuts, and there is not a whimper of protest coming from anyone but a few isolated liberals. I see a vast chasm looming in front of our country and the tea partiers are urging us right over the edge of the cliff.

Then I inform people that both the Democrats and the Republicans are Neo-liberal and everyone flips shit.

A few years ago, I set out to read the Qur'an from cover to cover in the original Arabic. I got as far as the beginning of Sura 3 (Al-i-`Imran) before getting sidetracked, and I think it's time to take it up again. I would like to recover something of the Arabic I studied for four years back in college.

There was an intriguing article in a magazine a while back that claimed that the standard story that the Qur'an was compiled in its present form in the time of Caliph `Uthman (644-656 by our calendar) is wrong; that it may have evolved over several centuries; and that Muhammad may have been more a legend than a historical person.

Oh, what, like the Bible and Jesus?

You mean people who have an axe to grind about the historicity of their holy book might not be totally honest with themselves about the historical reality of their chosen book?

Color me fucking shocked.

Certainly there are aspects of it that need explaining; for instance, several Hebrew names, such as Isaac, are close enough to their Arabic equivalents that they should have been easily understood by Arab listeners, yet seem not to have been. If "Yitzhaq" means "he laughs", that is "yad.haq" in Arabic, but the Qur'an spells the name "Ishaq", which is meaningless. Ishmael, Israel, and Abraham are similarly rendered incomprehensible. Yeshua (Jesus) is called Yasu` by Christian Arabs, yet the Qur'an names him `Isa. And John, which ought to have come out Yuhannan or some such, is Yahya. Could these names and the tales in which they figure have come into Arabic from Greek, Persian, or some other non-Semitic source?

Or maybe the scribes who copied the Quran down originally weren't perfectly literate themselves.

This might be shocking to modern people but back in the day spelling wasn't standardized and literacy was an especially rare thing to have.

Following on my previous post, I know that a number of y'all don't listen to the radio.

What could radio stations do differently that might get you to listen?

Basically be totally unlike radio.

Fewer commercials, better music, better disc jockeys--

Fuck.

Song of the now.