No rewriting today. Brain didn't want to work. A lot of paperwork got pushed. Food got eaten. Words, not so much written. However, I did update my portfolio. See, the good job closes tomorrow. Hopefully I'll be interviewing this week and that will be a necessary part of it. Also this week will see working on my own for the Census, and there's plenty to be read and get together. I'm sure I should probably have gotten a head start, but the government only pays for so much. But really hoping for the good job. Really, really hoping.

But I did get some recreational reading done. And below are two links from that.

And yet another reason why there should be little tolerance for mercenaries. Well, it's also an example of what happens when you mistake political ideology for a business plan. However, it should be noted, Blackwater ne Xee, was just a bad example of people who had political connection and cowboy bravado. You don't hear very much about Triple Canopy, which is about ten times as large and at least three times as old as Blackwater.

Going around the internets are links to a story that talked about how "great things were back in the 1880s" by a Jacob Hornberger. So far, this takedown on Kos is the one I agree with most. I don't read Kos, only when I'm linked to it (this is grokked from Jay Lake, whom I believe had it from someone else). This argument is the perfect example of what's starting to be called "the memory hole." There's plenty of that going on right now, people who forget just how far to the right this country has slewed since Reagan was elected President. So far that the justices now retiring are considered "liberal" when in fact they were (at one time) "center right" (a term that is now called "moderate", however the actual political position is now "center left", but only because the right has moved hard right) and they didn't adjust their positions that much. The money shot from the Kos article, on the libertarian "paradise" of 1880s, "You can reach this land of paradise with a couple of flights and a short boat ride. It's called Somalia." (Emphasis in the original) There are moderating statements, such as "... actual Libertarians realize that for individual rights to have any meaning, they require the presence of a body that can ensure those rights." What's happening, as the article suggests, is as "Republican" becomes tarnished in the same way they tarnished "Liberal", conservatives are hunting for a new label, and they are settling on "Libertarian."

And then there are the pictures of the volcanic eruption in Iceland that currently is grinding trans-Atlantic air travel to a halt. Wows.