[Vi1] A look at Genghis Khan’s spy network.
[Vi2] The dark history of the engineering of the VX Nerve Agent.
[Vi3] Civil War: The Battle of San Diego.
[Vi4] Do the armed forces need to get modern and ditch officer wife school? Not quite the same, but I’m in favor of all the home ec tutoring we can manage for anyone, wherever we can manage it.
[Vi5] Violence against tribeswomen is a huge problem. My sister-in-law is acting as an adjudicator for cases in Alaska, where the problem is less missing women and more sexually abused girls and women. It’s… a mess.
[Vi6] Ari Schulman argues that one of the best ways we may be able to prevent mass shootings is changing the way we cover them.
[Vi7] Slavery is making a comeback in Libya.
[Vi8] Colin Dickey has a writeup on a book involving The Great Cat and Dog Massacre of World War II, which it turns out may have been largely unnecessary.
[Vi9] Atomic bomb survivors draw Ground Zero in 1945.
Vi6: That will be a tough nut to crack, not because media is unwilling to cooperating so much as people just love sensational news, even when it’s horrific. Too many just gobble it up.Report
Yeah, this isn’t a new idea. I remember Roger Ebert talking about it, in a review of Elephant, back in the early 2000’s; ” I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1.”Report
Or possibly even further back, to Dean Ing’s short story “Very Proper Charlies” back in the late 70s, where they tried to combat terrorism by having all the major media players agree on how they covered terrorism, deliberately portraying the terrorists as bumbling fools (“Very Proper Charlie” apparently being a British slang term for fools). It didn’t go well, for reasons you’ll have to read the story to find out. I thought it an amusing idea, but one that could only have been written in the 70s back when you only needed NBC,ABC,CBS,PBS and a few big newspapers to agree to such a scheme.Report
Vi4: I had no idea that Officer Wife’s school exists. My inclination would to be get rid of it even if most officers are men married to women.Report
When my BIL was a civilian contractor doing command-and-control software installation in assorted bunkers in Europe, the Army assigned him the rank of “Colonel” so everyone knew how to relate to him. The good parts of that were that when the stove in their apartment died, there was an aide he could tell about the problem and the stove got replaced. The bad parts were listening to my sister complain about how she didn’t understand the unwritten codes of conduct and pecking order among the officers’ wives. As I recall, she once asked, “Was there a class I was supposed to have taken?”Report
Somehow I doubt a week long class could give a newbie any of the necessary insights into unwritten codes of conduct and pecking order among officers’ wives. I also don’t think this is what the teach at Officer’s Wives Class.Report
Vi9 – I found the pictures very moving and disturbing. Thanks for the link.
Even if humanity manages to avoid repeat occurrences of these explosions, they reverberate in ways that are not necessarily obvious. I wrote a little about such connections at AG in The Geopoetic Cyborg Report
What a good reflection that is, thank you for linking to it.Report
Vi8: “How did the pet massacre of 1939 come to be forgotten?” I have no idea, unless there were some other tragedies that occurred in the following few years that might have gotten some press attention.Report
A recent, incident of violence local to me, which I will link to by headline here because it is so awesomely odd. Fortunately, nobody was seriously hurt.
’Crazy spell’: Naked suspects in Nisku kidnapping may have sipped trippy tea.
Not noted in the article – the kidnappers and their victims were all apparently Jehovah’s Witnesses, and went to the same church.Report
Excellent story. Thanks for sharing. (Although I wish it had come up in an “upcoming weekend plans” thread.)Report