words, words, words
I have a hot Valentine's date with the man from Lint Van Lines, who is coming over to see how much it will cost to put my crap in a truck and put the truck in Reno.
Newly surfaced letters by Niels Bohr put a new spin on the mysterious September 1941 meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg in Copenhagen, and more or less refute Heisenberg's claim that he was trying to destroy the German atomic-weapons program from within. So the Michael Frayn play Copenhagen loses some historical cred, but what the hell, it's coming in a couple of weeks and I'd still like to see it. Except even the student tickets are $30, so nobody will want to go. I know how this works.
The troop buildup in the Philippines continues and Filipinos get nervous, recalling U.S. military campaigns a century ago.
Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, cited as an example a dinner he attended last week with people who work on intelligence issues and have connections with the intelligence community. The dinner conversation ranged in part on how U.S. military commander "Black Jack" Pershing used Islam's prohibition on pork to help crush an insurgency on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao after the Spanish-American War at the turn of the last century.
In one case, Graham explained in an interview, U.S. soldiers captured 12 Muslims and killed six with "bullets dipped into the fat of pigs." After that, Graham said, the U.S. soldiers wrapped the Muslim rebels in funeral shrouds made of pigskin and "buried them face down so they could not see Mecca. Then they poured the entrails of the pigs over them. The other six were forced to watch. And that was the end of the insurrection on Mindanao," Graham noted.
