Harry C. Merritt

For context: www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

Unfortunately, "I feel like Batman or Halo" has become one of the essential texts for understanding a certain type of American mind in the 2020s...
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Gotta love how academic books don't earn you money, but LLMs can make money off of stealing them in the aggregate and if you write enough, they can also profit from stealing your personality after you are dead.

An Unpopular, Doomed, Bloody War People will die and nothing will be accomplished

My thoughts

open.substack.com/pub/musgrave...

The Azores islands are the westernmost point of Europe and the easternmost point of Rhode Island

I do like how every time the Godzilla franchise is rebooted, things always shift from "this creature is a terrifying and unfathomable force of nature inevitably causing destruction in its wake" to "Godzilla's actually a pretty nice guy if you respect him--he protects us from the Bad Monsters"

We're losing the fight against antisemitism. Here's how to turn the tide The old ways aren't working. That doesn't mean that hope is lost

Unlike some people whose names are Bret, I don’t think the answer is to give up on the fight against antisemitism and only invest in Jews, but instead to think more about how antisemitism interacts with the rest of society. For @forward.com forward.com/opinion/8072...

Sahara (1943 American film) - Wikipedia

There’s a 1943 Humphrey Bogart movie called Sahara that also stars this tank! It’s worth a watch as a wartime artifact en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_...

This AI short film was shown before a feature film I saw this week. It was ugly and humorless, with its apparent punchlines undercut by how grotesque the film's protagonists (and everything) looked. It felt like when commercials first appeared before movie previews, but even more ominous.

Reading about big Latvian brains (Arveds Švābe, The Story of Latvia and Her Neighbours)

0-3 minutes / 3+ minutes

Traces of Baltic immigration in Providence, RI (though this club is sadly defunct)

For the local equivalent of about $45, I did this in Sigulda, Latvia years ago. The tradeoff for the low price point was that I sat in front of the bobsled and had to steer it with no training…

The promotional image has since been changed. Now it's a photo of Waffen-SS Latvian Legionnaires at the Paplaka training camp, while the event's title is lyrics from a Latvian Legion song, "Zem mūsu Kājām," set to the tune of "SS Marschiert in Feindesland" ("Devil's Song").
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A bizarre and unsettling choice by the Latvian War Museum (an institution that I otherwise respect) to use an AI-remixed/upscaled 1942 Nazi propaganda poster to promote an event of theirs next month. The soldiers depicted in the original poster are German, not Latvian!
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"Oops, when I proposed my plan to launch 1 million satellites into low Earth orbit, I forgot to check it against some basic principles in physics..."
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"I have decided to shift from colonizing from Mars to colonizing an even more inhospitable planetary body, because I just realized that Mars is farther away with a different orbit" is quite the announcement from someone who already promised to land humans on Mars by 2024.
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the polish figure skating team in the kiss and cry holding a plush pierogi

IMPORTANT OLYMPIC NEWS:

THE POLISH FIGURE SKATING TEAM HAS A PLUSH PIEROGI

Update: new frontiers in vagueness about a major historical event.
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This International Holocaust Remembrance Day, EU institutions mark Auschwitz's liberation but can't name its liberators, Russia names liberators but pivots toward a new holiday centering "the Soviet people" as genocide victims, and the White House uses the occasion to debate "illegal immigration."

I was always told that one of the central lessons of the Shoah is that legal, juridical regimes can still be immoral. The claim that Anne Frank was in Amsterdam "legally" is false, but more than that, the question "Was Anne Frank an illegal?" is so grossly missing the point of Holocaust remembrance.

As with the “g-word,” what’s more important than ticking all the boxes for a scholarly definition are addressing the questions, “what is the current trend?” and “what are the risks if such trends continue?” Academic definitions and legal thresholds ≠ political responses

I've always found the "Leopards Eating People's Faces Party" phrasing clunky and annoying, but it has been repeatedly validated in the past decade. Just endless iterations of "I voted for Trump, who said he'd Build the Wall, but I never thought he'd do it over MY butterfly sanctuary!"

"Kā tad nu ir ar leģiona cīņas jēgu, kad tā būtu bijusi un kad izbeigusies? Kad dezertieris bija dezertieris un no kura laika, vai no kuras vietas, tā paša ienaidnieka – boļševika priekšā, sāka skaitīties par tautai un tēvzemei 'patīkamu' darbu, ka dzīvā spēka saglabāšana?" -Ādolfs Blāķis

I posted this on the other place a year ago in response to the same author and it still feels pertinent. While the Russian government would welcome the fragmentation of NATO, the origins of the Greenland crisis are internal to the United States and should not be attributed to outside actors.

Take this 1868 report commissioned by former U.S. Senator Robert J. Walker, which advocates purchase of Iceland and Greenland for geopolitical and economic reasons (and toward the ultimate goal of annexing Canada!), received positively by Secretary of State William Seward (who purchased Alaska).

I do not find this to be a helpful approach for understanding (or even opposing) Trump's fixation on Greenland. American history provides ample evidence of general expansionist aims and of longstanding interest by various U.S. administrations in the territory of Greenland.
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This Indian restaurant in Rhode Island attributes its name to the Sanskrit word for "essence," yet it always made me do a double take since "rasa" is also the Latvian and Lithuanian word for "dew," coming from the same linguistic source.