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reblog if you’ve read fanfictions that are more professional, better written than some actual novels. I’m trying to see something

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I cannot overstate how much I love Tom Lehrer's story. It sounds so fake but is entirely real.

He's a goddamn genius- he started studying mathematics at Harvard when he was 15 and graduated magna cum laude. He worked at Los Alamos for a few years before being drafted and working for the NSA, where he claims to have invented jello shots to get around alcohol bans.

He then went back to Harvard for a couple years before starting to teach political science at MIT.

Through all of that, he was writing and performing both some of the funniest shit you'll ever hear (Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, Masochism Tango) and absolutely scathing political satire (Who's Next, Wernher von Braun, Send the Marines). Until the mid/late 60s counterculture gained momentum. He didn't like their aesthetic, so he stopped making music.

Shortly after, he moved to California and started teaching math and musical theater history at the UC Santa Cruz for the next 30 years.

I don't know if non-Californians understand just how goddamn funny that is. It's where stoners and math (and now computer science) kids who couldn't get into Berkeley go. Leaving Harvard/MIT for UCSC is peak academic phoning it in. And by all accounts he had a blast.

Plus the whole putting all of his music in the public domain thing. That fucked.

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this is the funniest tweet i’ve seen in months bye

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being abused or neglected really makes it clear how many things are skills that nobody really treats as. skills. exercising autonomy is a skill. listening to your body is a skill. resting is a skill. being liked and being loved are skills. nobody tells you how to do this shit because nobody even told me I was supposed to have learnt these things when I was a kid. I kind of just have to manually figure out what makes me freak out and work from there. unfair as shit

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Hello friends! Did you go through all that effort to uninstall Copilot -

*checks notes*

- just two weeks ago? Well check again, because Microsoft snuck it back onto my laptop and tablet after all the effort I made to nuke it from orbit!

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speculative fiction writers i am going to give you a really urgent piece of advice: don't say numbers. don't give your readers any numbers. how heavy is the sword? lots. how old is that city? plenty. how big is the fort? massive. how fast is the spaceship? not very, it's secondhand.

the minute you say a number your readers can check your math and you cannot do math better than your most autistic critic. i guarantee. don't let your readers do any math. when did something happen? awhile ago. how many bullets can that gun fire? trick question, it shoots lasers, and it shoots em HARD.

you are lying to people for fun. if you let them do math at you the lie collapses and it's no fun anymore.

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Europe is rearming and they have rebuffed Trump, Vance, Rubio, and Musk. Since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine Europe has undergone its largest re-armament and modernization program in History. Every country in Western Europe, not just the NATO states, has massively increased their military budgets and some by more than 5 times their pre-invasion spending. Poland has also constructed massive military fortifications along their border with Belarus and Russia that would make a Russian ground invasion collapse or at least grind to a halt indefinitely.

Putin’s military is shattered and has nearly run out of arms, ammunition, and supplies. They have lost nearly a million dead and wounded. The Russian army has proved to be disastrously incompetent and ill equipped. They are relying on conscripts, convicts, and mercenaries. They’ve been supplemented by North Koreans that are even less trained and motivated and are arriving without equipment and riddled with diseases.

Russia has proven it does not have the ability to defeat Ukraine or even a single NATO state, let alone the whole alliance. NATO states have a nuke sharing agreement and even if the US pulls out France and the UK each have enough to destroy Russia many times over. The Germans are furious with the way the Trump administration has been treating them and meddling in their domestic politics. Some months back French president Macron threatened to send his own troops into Ukraine after Putin interfered in the French elections. All the members of the European Union have individually stated they are prepared to go it alone without the US. They are likely meeting now to formalize that. The European Union does not need the US as their joint economy and militaries make them nearly are equal and likely soon to be our superior.

They are not going to be brow beaten into submission like so many states were by Hitler prior to the commencement of a shooting war. Canada has long had not so secret military discussions with both France and the UK regarding military aid should a rogue US administration try to invade them or engage in economic hostilities. It’s commonly known among educated Canadians and there have even been Canadians novels loosely based on this.

Now it may seem like our allies are well prepared and planning for the worst but there are flies in the ointment. The greatest variable is that Putin is a nut job who can only hold power by launching military operations to rally the base around him. He’s done this before every election but with his losses he’s on thinner ice than ever with his own people. He also has a stated policy of “nuclear de-escalation” which NATO officials have written about at length. What it means is he invades a territory then places tactical nukes there and then “de-escalates” by threatening to nuke anyone who tries to dislodge him. Russia hasn’t done this yet as it is a plan reserved for NATO states not his lesser neighbors.

The simple fact is that no matter how much of his power, and his nation’s power crumbles around him, he just doesn’t give a flying f—k. He knows he is a dead man the moment he loses offices so he is prepared to take the world down with him, because that’s what lunatics do.

The other variable is that Trump is an ignorant, drug-addled, madman with delusions of grandeur and dreams of being remembered as one of history’s greatest tyrants alongside Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Stalin, etc. Trump is currently attempting to blackmail Ukraine into giving him all of that country’s rare earth minerals that are desperately needed to produce computers, cell tech, and other advanced tech. Now since Trump is an aging idiot he was most likely informed of the need for them by Muskrat and the other tech bros. He’s also going to meet with Putin and MBS in Saudi Arabia to work on a settlement for the Ukraine war. Could you find three bigger villains? The only one missing is Xi of China who is making final preparations to invade Taiwan and seize 99% of the world’s semiconductor production. Xi knows he has Musk and Trump in his pocket and that the US will no longer defend that strategic island.

Likely Trump and Putin are planning to divide up Europe and the Americas like Hitler and Stalin divided Poland while China is given free rein in Asia like the Axis empower Japan to do in World War II. Many Americans, especially some older types, former veterans, and white supremacists have a fascination with Hitler and WWII. They saw Germany as an underdog and wondered (even wished to have seen) what would have happened had Germany won.

Something big is brewing and the European Union leaders know the time has come. Many of them are telling their press as we speak that Europe has relied on the U.S. for too long and that they wish they had increased their military budgets sooner and began their own war preparations without the U.S. as an ally or even a possible foe. The world’s biggest democracy and biggest non-aligned nation, India, also knows something is brewing and has cancelled their military contracts with Russia while placing arms orders with European countries. They are also planning to invest in creating a homegrown defense industry so they will no longer be reliant on others and better able to stand up to the endless border wars China keeps launching against them.

What we’re seeing now is extremely similar to what transpired immediately before both world wars.

In a past life I was a historian and defense analyst before a series of family tragedies forced me to step back and take a local position as an educator and part-time internet know it all. I’ve spent decades researching these things and how they are driven by politics. Nothing is carved in stone, especially when the primary bad actors are as unstable as sh-t house rats.

All the people who still do this for a living are certain that the next several months will see us devolve into a fascist dictatorship unless something dramatic happens. Dear leader passing away, losing his nerve and backing down, or grow tired of Musk upstaging him and removing the South African bastard. There’s also a slim chance he’ll be impeached if the Dems take back both houses of Congress in the mid-terms and even slimmer chance that he will be deposed by a popular uprising. He’s very erratic and not sleeping enough and switching back and forth between coke and Adderall doesn’t help, nor does his obvious cognitive decline.

Putin is more worrisome at this point as he’s slowly but steadily losing control. Xi like all his predecessors is extremely patient but he’d be blind not to see this will likely be his best chance to snatch Taiwan, albeit at a high cost when he would prefer to take it without the expense of a war. Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia remain total wildcards sitting in close proximity to a large part of the world’s oil. All are using proxies or are themselves client states. Israel has nukes. Iran secretly has or will shortly have them. Saudi Arabia is believed to have purchased the technology from Trump with that infamous $2 billion dollar gift to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Empty folders of nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago point to this.

In summation few of the outcomes facing us are good. The world is again on the cusp of large regional wars, if not a world war. International lawlessness has already commenced and will certainly escalate. Fascism is imminent at home. The death of America as a super power and the world’s policeman is at hand. Trump’s insane tariffs, dismantling of government agencies, and removal of social safety nets will at the least cause a very large and long lasting recession if not a depression. If a depression takes root it will likely spread worldwide. A worldwide depression could lead to large scale wars as it did with WWII.

Putting lunatics in charge is going to end much worse than Trump’s first reign of terror. And remember a million Americans died that time from his incompetence. This time his people are prepared and are already wreaking havoc at an unprecedented level.

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Stop Waiting For The Perfect Moment and Seize Your Opportunities YOUTUBE | INSTAGRAM

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Mid-Century Radios From Genuine Plastic Radios of the Mid-Century, Ken Jupp & Leslie Piña, 1998.

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A declassified World War II-era government guide to “simple sabotage” is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and “describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly.”  Over the last week, the guide has surged to become the 5th-most-accessed book on Project Gutenberg, an open source repository of free and public domain ebooks. It is also the fifth most popular ebook on the site over the last 30 days, having been accessed nearly 60,000 times over the last month (just behind Romeo and Juliet). 

Link to the Guide at Project Gutenberg can be found here

A Wikisource entry can be found here.

Mirrors can be found here, here, here, here and here.

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If you reblog my pinned post you'll receive a random shrine blessing

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From