Chris > Recent Status Updates

Some of these scenes, when Billy first catches the wolf, and has her on a leash like a dog.... :)
-Well come on to the house.
-What do you want me to do with her?
-Her?
-This here wolf.
-Well I guess it'll just have to lay around the kitchen till we get done eatin.
-Lay around the kitchen?
-It's a joke, son. Hell fire. You brought that thing in the house you could hear my wife in Albuquerque with the wires down.

they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing. pg 30

Sides (the author) has been doing some worrying "filler" content... all the stuff about the Tahitan, Mai, for many early pages, and now including observations about the sea and flying fish from a random sailor who isn't even on Cook's ship, but on the very far behind sister-ship.

Still struggling with this book. Despite how important the material is, i find it reads like a boring technical manual.

[GOP in Wisconsin} "giddy" about a law that would suppress "minority and college voters". (pg 111)

It must be some kind of warning sign, that your party is about to give up on democracy, when it's a danger to your party to have people with an education able to cast a vote.

I don't know how they've done it - but for an incredibly important topic - and though they've tried to do this in the "popular" style of non-fiction writing (as opposed to a more academic style)... these guys have really made this a boring read so far.

pg 16 - this is parenting 101 at it's best:
(Cyrus feeding baby Adam whiskey from a rag for three days after the death of his wife)
"And when at the end of three days his father finally went out and bought a goat, Adam drank the milk greedily, vomited, drank more, and was on his way. His father did not find the reaction alarming, since he was doing the same thing" :)

"This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies - [the] working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; [depriving] people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power..." (pg 30)
-- all this is Havel describing life under communist rule in the 1970s. A lot of parallels with 2025 :(

Haruf was dying, and he knew it, when he wrote this... so perhaps some "take it or leave it I don't care anymore" feelings were at play for him when he wrote this... but some stylistic decisions were made that I'm not sure I'm loving... :(

From the very dawn of the internet age, and even before Google and facebook etc, the Russians recognized the possibilities of the internet:
"our goal was to cause dissension and unrest inside the U.S. and anti-American feelings abroad," Tretyakov recalled. (page 333).
Well... mission accomplished (?)

Russian manipulation of western media dates back DECADES!
Dictum from the Stasi: "more competitive and polarized media outlets presented a major opportunity. 'For the man on the street it is getting harder to assess and to judge the written word. [He] is ever more helpless in the face of the monsters that are opinion factories. This is where we come in as an intelligence agency" (pg 196).

Having an official government body to spread disinformation (fake news etc) goes back to 1923 in Russia.
"On Jan 11, 1923, a remarkable institutional innovation saw the light of day: Artuzov created an office for dezinformatsiya, or disinformation." (page 25).

Shalev Hulio - "... a system that would allow all the intelligence and law enforcement bodies to be in control of telephones remotely, or to extract information from them, with or without the user's knowledge." (page 173).
And yes, the most authoritarian and horrendous governments in the world can buy this technology to hack and then kill anyone who opposes the regime.

Well, it's pretty scary to know that authoritarian regimes can buy spyware from companies in "western" countries, and use that spyware to spy on, hunt down, and kill, people who oppose their regimes (i.e. Saudi Arabia killing Jamal Khashoggi after hacking his phone and the phones of his associates).
As bad as all this spyware seemed before, I didn't realize the west would sell this technology to dictatorships :(

I never knew this fact: the reason the Donner party got into their horrendous situation in the FIRST place, was due to a classic greedy capitalist named Lansford Hastings, who was trying to divert settlers from Oregon to California, so he could profit off them. To divert them, he promoted an untried/unknown "short cut" to California, that did nothing but lead these settlers to misery and death.

[Huron] girls were not interested. They had a lot to lose from Christianity. The priests had already told the Ossossane council that they wanted to control women's sex lives and and abolish their rights to divorce and child support (pg 209).

The Jesuits in Huronia are pretty infuriating. :( page 168 "... and those Hurons who did let the priest into their homes made him stop talking or threw him out when he mentioned baptism. The priests' determination to perform rituals on their dying children seemed creepy and evil to the Hurons."

(p.74) "Huronia is one of the snowiest regions in North America"
pg 75) where the author describes Brebeuf's experience of the weather in 1626... ""blizzards blasted in from Georgian Bay without warning, and temperatures could plunge to -40 at night..."
Living in this region myself - yep! - this matches my experiences here :)

Zing!! :)
Page 19 in the introduction, Bourrie writes that modern society shouldn't feel too smug about certain achievements because, after all, "Just a few years ago, we also thought we had fascism beaten."