Tag: miscellaneous

Wherein Kevin Channels Al Qaeda

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Having been recently accused of harboring commenters “little different” from Al Qaeda members, particularly on the topic of homosexuality, I thought I’d offer a preliminary brief comment on something I found via AR15.com today. (I fully intend to crank out an Überpost on the subject, hopefully this weekend.)

It would seem that two University of Michigan sociologists, Karin A. Martin and Emily Kazyak, have authored a paper, published in Gender & Society, entitled “Hetero-Romantic Love and Heterosexiness in Children’s G-Rated Films” (available as a PDF file.) Ms. Martin is an associate professor of sociology, and Ms. Kazyak is a doctoral candidate whose “research interests include gender, sexuality, social theory, and social psychology.”

The link that brought me to the paper came from the decidedly right-wing site LifeSiteNews.com in a piece entitled “Team of Researchers Blames Children’s Films for Perpetuating ‘Heteronormativity'”. I’ll admit, my initial response to the piece was that I thought it had to be satire.

Sadly, no.

I Googled “Sociologists for Women in Society,” which is a real organization, and from there it was a pretty simple couple of steps to find and download the source document. Now, I haven’t finished reading it yet, but in the first couple of pages I found some eminently quotable stuff that I just had to share. In fact, the paper opens with a quote from another sociologist, Henry A. Giroux:

The role that Disney plays in shaping individual identities and controlling fields of social meaning through which children negotiate the world is far too complex to be simply set aside as a form of reactionary politics. If educators and other cultural workers are to include the culture of children as an important site of contestation and struggle, then it becomes imperative to analyze how Disney’s animated films powerfully influence the way America’s cultural landscape is imagined.

(Emphasis mine.)

I thought educators were supposed to educate. Here we have a sociologist telling us explicitly (with the implicit approval of the authors of the paper in question, since they chose the quote) that the job of “educators and other cultural workers” is to use the “culture of children as an important site of contestation and struggle.” How Marxist that sounds, doesn’t it? The pertinent question would be “contestation and struggle” against what? This reminds me very much of the daycare teachers that inspired my essay The George Orwell Daycare Center who wanted to use their position as educators to teach children that “a class-based capitalistic society” is “unjust and oppressive.”

But this isn’t a paper about economics, it’s about sociology and sexuality. The next quote illustrates the authors’ position:

Heteronormativity includes the multiple, often mundane ways through which heterosexuality overwhelmingly structures and “pervasively and insidiously” orders “everyday existence”.

(Reference omitted.)

Checking my dictionary for the word “insidious,” I find this definition:

1. intended to entrap or beguile: an insidious plan.
2. stealthily treacherous or deceitful: an insidious enemy.
3. operating or proceeding in an inconspicuous or seemingly harmless way but actually with grave effect: an insidious disease.

So “heteronormativity” is “insidious.”

Here’s where I go all Al Qaeda on you. Now, one of my absolute favorite quotes comes from Teresa Nielson Hayden, wherein she says:

Basically, I figure guns are like gays: They seem a lot more sinister and threatening until you get to know a few; and once you have one in the house, you can get downright defensive about them.

(Hey, this is a gun blog.) But one thing homosexuals are not is normal, in the original definition of the term as “approximately average.” They are outside the norm. They’ve even adopted for themselves the word “queer,” which is defined as “strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint; unusually different.” But here we have a paper that seems to open with the statement that “heteronormativity” is “insidious,” (when, in fact, it’s “normal” – by definition) and it’s the job of “educators and other cultural workers” to “contest and struggle” with this insidiousness, starting with our CHILDREN.

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

(*Ahem*) Excuse me, but fuck THAT noise.

More (much more) to follow, hopefully this weekend, but we’ll see how long it takes for THIS Überpost to spring forth fully formed from my sweat-beaded forehead. Oh, and I’d very much like to hear from the GLBT audience on this. I know for sure that at least two gunbloggers are open and read this blog at least occasionally, Jeff at Alphecca and Zendo Deb of TFS Magnum. Comments?

Well, That Wasn’t So Bad

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Well, That Wasn’t So Bad

My first root canal was this morning. My gum’s a little tender where the needle went in (and in, and in) for the anesthetic, but other than that, no real discomfort. All I’ve taken all day is a couple of Motrin. I can even bite down on my left side with no problem. I was in the chair for about 90 minutes as the doctor had a little trouble finding the roots (very deep in the tooth), but it all came out OK (no pun intended.)

The stock market decline has been more painful for me than this damned tooth.

Update On the $134.5B in Bearer Bonds Case

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I first linked to this story on Friday, June 12. Here’s an interesting update from the U.K. Telegraph:

Is this the death of the dollar?

After two smugglers were stopped last week with what at first appeared to be $134bn in US state bonds, the tension and paranoia surrounding the fate of the dollar hit a new high.

By Edmund Conway
Published: 7:32PM BST 20 Jun 2009

Border guards in Chiasso see plenty of smugglers and plenty of false-bottomed suitcases, but no one in the town, which straddles the Italian-Swiss frontier, had ever seen anything like this. Trussed up in front of the police in the train station were two Japanese men, and beside them a suitcase with a booty unlike any other. Concealed at the bottom of the bag were some rather incredible sheets of paper. The documents were apparently dollar-denominated US government bonds with a face value of a staggering $134bn (£81bn).

How on earth did these two men, who at first refused to identify themselves, come to be there, trying to ride the train into Switzerland carrying bonds worth more than the gross domestic product of Singapore? If the bonds were genuine, the pair would have been America’s fourth-biggest creditor, ahead of the UK and just behind Russia. No sooner had the story leaked out from the Italian lakes region last week than it sparked a panoply of conspiracy tales. But one resounded more than any other: that the men were agents of the Japanese finance ministry, in the country for the G8 meeting, making a surreptitious journey into Switzerland to sell off one small chunk of the massive mountain of US bonds stacked up in the Japanese Treasury vaults.

In the event, late last week American officials confirmed that the notes were forgeries. The men, it appeared, were nothing more than ambitious scamsters. But many remain unconvinced. And whether fake or otherwise, the story underlines one important point about the world economy at the moment: that the tension and paranoia surrounding the fate of the US dollar has hit a new high. It went to the heart of the big question: will the central bankers in Japan, China and elsewhere continue to support the greenback even in the wake of the worst financial crisis in modern history, or will they abandon it as America’s economic hegemony dissipates?

Dollar obituaries are nothing new. The currency has been presumed dead more times than Shane Macgowan. But like the lead singer of The Pogues, the greenback has somehow withstood repeated knocks and scrapes over the years and lived on, battered, bruised and a couple of teeth the lighter, to fight another day. In the 1970s and 1980s there were plenty predicting its demise, although at that point the main challenger was the Japanese yen. And in the years preceding this crisis, economists and investors including Peter Schiff and George Soros were lining up to declare the dollar’s demise as the world’s reserve currency. In the late 1990s, the creation of the euro gave dollar sceptics another stick to beat the currency with, and no doubt the European currency has claimed some of the prominence in its first decade.

Now, following the collapse of the global financial system, those warnings have become louder still, and ever more difficult to dismiss – because this time around there are threatening noises coming from those who actually have the power to do something about it. First came a paper from Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), a couple of months ago, positing the idea of introducing the special drawing right (SDR) – a kind of internal currency at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – as an international reserve currency. These calls were then repeated, with more force, by the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, who last week declared that the world needed new reserve currencies in addition to the dollar.

There’s more. I strongly recommend that you read the rest, and hopefully I’ll have an addendum to this post later this evening.

UPDATE: (As promised)

Here’s some more interesting stuff on this incident.

On June 16, the site Seeking Alpha put up a list of what was termed “strange inconsistencies” in the story, but here’s the pertinent paragraph (IMO)

Thus far, about the only piece of information that appears to be reliable as reported by various news sources regarding this huge mystery is the remarkable authenticity of the 249 seized bearer bonds in denominations of USD $500 million. If any of the other facts, as they are being reported, are remotely accurate, then the bearer bonds were likely counterfeit. Still, the interesting part of this story, at least to me, is that the smugglers seemed intent on being caught with the counterfeit bonds. This leads me back to my previous question. What possible reason would the smugglers have for wanting to be caught? One of the quickest ways to sabotage and usher in the death of a currency is to raise legitimate questions about its ability to withstand counterfeiting efforts. Prove that counterfeiting is not only possible but highly likely, and the world’s confidence in the sabotaged currency will undoubtedly plummet.

The comments to this piece are even more interesting, including a link to a story about scam run in 2004 using counterfeit $500k, $100M and $500 million-denomination 1934-dated bearer bonds.

And then there’s another speculative post from The Market Ticker from yesterday. This one quotes a Reuters story:

A purported $134 billion in U.S. government bearer bond certificates seized by police near the Italian-Swiss border are fake, the U.S. Treasury said on Friday.

“Based on the photograph we’ve seen online, they are clearly fake. And not even good fakes,” said Stephen Meyerhardt, a spokesman for the Treasury’s Bureau of the Public Debt.

He added that there is only $105 million in Treasury bearer bond securities outstanding, so the $134 billion amount seized far exceeds the universe of outstanding securites.

However:

In the last two years, Italian authorities have seized some $800 million of U.S. bonds in the Como area in northern Italy.

Were they bearer bonds? And here’s the key graph from that Reuters piece:

The forgery determination came a day after the Treasury warned U.S. banks against the potential for increased currency counterfeiting activity and large cash transactions by North Korea in an effort to evade U.N. sanctions aimed at cutting off financing for Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and missile programs.

Which kind of answers most of the “who, what, where, when and why” questions, doesn’t it?

Except for these, from the Market Ticker piece:

So let’s see if we can try to sort out what we’re “learning”:

  • The bonds are declared fake by the Treasury, stating that there’s only $100 million outstanding and obviously $134 billion have to be fake.
  • Italy claims to have seized $800 million in real US Bonds in the last year.
  • The last legitimate issue of paper US Treasuries (that is publicly admitted to) was in the early 1980s when bearer instruments were outlawed. All are now stated to be electronic (just a serial number and amount.)
  • The two gentlemen are allegedly Japanese, and there are various stories about who they really are – from notorious counterfeiters who have served hard time for previous offenses to Japanese finance officials. Most notably, there has been no public statement from Italy about these gentlemen’s actual identities.
  • It appears from all reports that these two were detained but not arrested, with some reports that they were not only released but took the allegedly-fake instruments with them, even though Italian law precludes both your release and return of your fake instruments if you are caught with fake securities or currency.
This is stuff out of a Tom Clancy novel, and the longer it goes on and the more twisted the “explanations”, the less sense it makes.
I find it incomprehensible that the Italian government released these two if they were actually caught in a massive counterfeiting operation with $134 billion in fake US Securities.
I find it equally incomprehensible that there was not an immediate indictment out of a US Prosecutor coming from such an event and a demand for extradition back to the United States.
And further, I find it equally incomprehensible that if the securities are in fact real, and Treasury is lying, that Italy would not impose the fine.
Only the latter scenario, however, covers what apparently has happened – the two “couriers”, whoever they are, have been released and, according to some accounts, they took the allegedly “fake” instruments with them, and there has been no US indictment issued for counterfeiting the instruments.
Uh, can we have some truth here folks, because none of what is being reported adds up and my BS detector is ringing off the hook.

Mine too. (End of update.)

This is Cute

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This is Cute

I just received this via email from my brother:

It is the month of August on the shores of the Black Sea. It is raining, and the little town looks totally deserted. It is tough times, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.

Suddenly, a rich tourist comes to town. He enters the only hotel, lays a 100 Euro note on the reception counter, and goes to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one.

The hotel proprietor takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the butcher. The Butcher takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the pig grower..

The pig grower takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the supplier of his feed and fuel.

The supplier of feed and fuel takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the town’s prostitute that in these hard times, gave her “services” on credit.

The hooker runs to the hotel, and pays off her debt with the 100 Euro note to the hotel proprietor to pay for the rooms that she rented when she brought her clients there.

The hotel proprietor then lays the 100 Euro note back on the counter so that the rich tourist will not suspect anything. At that moment, the rich tourist comes down after inspecting the rooms, and takes his 100 Euro note, after saying that he did not like any of the rooms, and leaves town.

No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now without debt, and looks to the future with a lot of optimism. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the United States Government is doing business today.

And if that doesn’t scare you, then you are brain dead!

Hey! I know! Let’s just declare all debts paid off and start over!

Justice?

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Justice?

By the time the game warden arrived, Kevin Kadamus was sitting down and holding his 17-year-old son in his lap, a blanket covering the boy’s bloodied body.

“He was trying to talk to his son, encouraging him to hang on,” Warden David Gregory said.

Jacob Kadamus couldn’t hang on. With a 12-gauge shotgun, his father had mistakenly shot him in the torso on the opening day of Vermont’s turkey hunting season. He died at the scene.

Now, Kevin Kadamus must cope with more than remorse and grief. The 45-year-old computer consultant and father of three has been charged with manslaughter.

That’s the opening of an AP piece entitled “Hunting deaths pose challenge for prosecutors”. As one investigator put it, “There isn’t an exemption under the law for family members being charged.”

In 2006, according to the CDC (the latest stats available), 611 people age 10 and up died as the result of an unintentional gunshot wound. The CDC doesn’t break that data down into hunting accidents, but you can see that they are pretty rare overall. Some are called “accidents” and no charges are filed, but as one game warden was quoted, “There’s three distinct actions that have to take place: You have to aim the firearm, take the safety off and you have to pull the trigger. None of those actions are ever accidental. The simplest way to avoid an accident is to identify your target.” Shooting someone accidentally requires multiple violations of the four rules of safe gun handling. It’s not accidental. At the very least it’s negligent.

But is criminal prosecution called for when the victim is a family member? Is the purpose of such prosecution punishment? What punishment can be greater than the knowledge of ones responsibility for the death of a loved one? Deterrence? The incidence is so rare to begin with that I find that idea laughable. Justice? For whom? Who is served?

It’s different when the negligence is that of someone outside the family, as in the case of the two Oklahoma police officers involved in the accidental shooting death of a 5 year-old, or the complete negligent misuse of a firearm such as the moron who shot his wife while trying to use his .22 pistol as a drill.

Or is it? I’m interested in your thoughts on this.

You Know, If You Put Enough Garlic On It

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You Know, If You Put Enough Garlic On It . . .

. . . crow still tastes like sh!t.


Billy’s right.

Again.

I let emotion get the better of me, and leaped with insufficient consideration. Now I sit here impaled on my own fallibility.

Hey, we lesser beings do that from time to time.

Let me be right up front. Billy Beck grates on my nerves. A lot of people do that, but Billy’s the only one who’s right damned near every time, and I’m man enough to admit that. He grates on my nerves because of his 80-grit high-speed carborundum personality, and I let that get the better of me. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. And I mean that, sincerely.

I misinterpreted his comment – the one I used as “Quote of the Day” Saturday. I was wrong. It fit a mental niche I’d carved out, and I slotted him right into that niche. As I said, I knew I was going to regret it later. I do. But when I conclude I’m wrong, I try not to compound the error.

I was wrong. I apologize. The other threads will contain, shortly, a link to this apology. Hopefully this concludes this week’s episode of Drama Llamas, brought to you courtesy of my personal assholeness. I’d blame it on an abscessed tooth, but no, it was just me being me.

Again, Beck, I apologize. I fucked up. You were right. Again.

Sigh

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*Sigh*

And the beat goes on . . .

Beck has responded to yesterday’s QotD post. He copied me via email, so I’ll post my reply to him as I sent it, verbatim:

Billy Beck wrote: 

 "Beck's threatened retribution over this post,..."

You really are a fuckin' asshole, Kevin.  You can complain about me all day
long, but I never do things like that, to you or anyone else.

Pot? Meet kettle. Right back at’cha, Billy. You have and you did. I quote:

“You will be exposed as an ignoramus of very dubious motive if you press on in this direction.

If you don’t think so, then make the most of it.“

and:

“I’m going to watch, and then deal.

I told you.“

That’s a threat, sir. Very similar to the previous:

“Now: just do it. If you don’t, then the very *least* that you can count on is me making you a resounding hypocrite all over the whole ‘net, and it will never stop. You will go down in history with my boot in your ass. And that’s just the beginning. I’ve dealt with this sort of thing before, and I know the whole course.“

That wasn’t a threat?

*I did no such thing*, you chintzy little girl.  You don't know what you're
talking about.  Words mean things, son, and "retaliation" does not mean what
you think it does.

Well, apparently I’m hindered by the fact that I’m one of the “inferior animals that looks like a human being,” so you have to cut me some slack, because that sure did read as a threat. Yes sir, words mean things. We simple creatures take the simple interpretations first.

And the name-calling? Very creative. I’m awed. Truly.
 

 I haven't said a word about it out loud for a couple of reasons, and I
probably won't.  (I'm not sure yet.)  Everyone in your little high school
class out there will believe you and I'm not going to worry about that.

It's just so puny and shitty, man.  I would expect this sort of thing from
a Usenet liberal.  As little as I think of you, and didn't have you figured
for that.

I do now, though.

And I used to respect you a lot more than I do now. But it has become apparent that you’re a sad, angry little man pissed at the world because it doesn’t meet your high expectations. It’s a bitch when you figure out that your philosophy, however perfectly it functions in your mind, is disregarded by 99% of the people around you, isn’t it? Your schtick of screeching and flinging feces like a rabid baboon any time someone disagrees with you about anything has gotten past old. You’ve got about three emotional settings: one, seven, and eleven, and it appears (at least to me) that you’re spending more time at eleven than at any other. I can no longer hear you over the sound of your own anger. But that’s my fault too, I guess. Your own personal little clique of admirers will believe you, I’m sure, so we’re even on that score.

You once said that you didn’t understand why people didn’t lead themselves. It appears that you’ve finally figured it out, and that realization has embittered the fuck out of you. Well, sorry, but you’re the one whose perspective has changed. Humanity is as it’s pretty much always been. I try to deal with what is, rather than how I think it ought to be. That makes me less than a human being in your eyes, I suppose. Try not to be too disappointed in the fact that I can live content despite your disapproval. You’re disappointed with the world enough already, I’d hate to add to your already crushing burden.

Kevin

As I said, I knew going into this I was going to regret it, but I needed to do it.

I’m sure the poo-flinging isn’t over yet.

UPDATE: The poo-flinging is finished. I was wrong, and I apologized.

$134.5 Billion in Bonds?

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(Found at AR15.com)

2 Japanese carrying $134 bil worth of U.S. bonds detained in Italy

ROME —

Two Japanese nationals were detained by Italian financial police last week after trying to enter Switzerland with $134 billion worth of undeclared U.S. bonds, mostly Treasury bonds, an Italian daily said Wednesday. The Japanese consulate general in Milan confirmed that the detention had taken place and said it was trying to confirm with Italian authorities whether the two were indeed Japanese nationals and their identities.

According to the report in il Giornale, two unidentified Japanese in their 50s concealed the bonds, including 249 U.S. Treasury bonds each worth $500 million, in a suitcase with a false bottom that was searched by the Italian authorities June 3 when they were in Chiasso, at the border with Switzerland, about 50 kilometers north of Milan. The daily did not say on what charges they have been detained, but the two may have been detained on suspicion of attempting to take a large amount of securities out of Italy without declaring it because the paper said they had not declared the bonds.

Note the date in the original article – June 3.

More:

Italy Seizes $135 BILLION Of US Bonds

This is a totally crazy story.

Asia Times: Italy’s financial police (Guardia italiana di Finanza) has seized US bonds worth US 134.5 billion from two Japanese nationals at Chiasso (40 km from Milan) on the border between Italy and Switzerland. They include 249 US Federal Reserve bonds worth US$ 500 million each, plus ten Kennedy bonds and other US government securities worth a billion dollar each.

The question now is whether the bonds are real or counterfeit

Karl Denninger, who discovered the story, notes that either way, this is wild:

If they’re real, what government (the only entity that would have such a cache) is trying to unload them?

If they’re fake, this is arguably the biggest counterfeiting operation ever, by a factor of many times. I’ve seen news about various counterfeiting operations over the years that have made me chuckle, but this one, if that’s what it is, is absolutely jaw-dropping.

The cute part of this is that if the certificates are real Italy just got a hell of a bonanza – their money laundering laws provide for a statutory 40% penalty for failure to declare instruments and cash in excess of $10,000 Euros, which means they’d garner a close-to-$40 billion dollar windfall.

We’re leaning towards counterfeit on this one. Either way, we wanna know more!

Me too. Here’s a picture of the seized bonds:


A poster at ARFCOM found this interesting coincidence:

Yosano Says Japan’s Trust in Treasuries ‘Unshakable’

June 12 (Bloomberg) — Japanese Finance Minister Kaoru Yosano said his government is confident about the outlook for U.S. Treasuries, signaling the second-biggest foreign holder of the securities will keep buying them amid record sales.

“We have complete trust in the fact that the U.S. views its strong-dollar policy as fundamental,” Yosano, 70, said in an interview in Tokyo on June 10 before attending a Group of Eight meeting of finance ministers starting today in Italy. “So our trust in U.S. Treasuries is absolutely unshakable.”

China and Russia, the largest and third-largest single holders of the debt, have said they may switch some of their reserves out of Treasuries, and economist Nouriel Roubini said yesterday the dollar won’t always be the world’s reserve currency. Treasury yields fell today after Yosano’s remarks, retreating from a seven-month high.

“Japan is, of course, mindful that selling Treasuries will cause the yen to strengthen and that would hurt corporate profits,” said Chotaro Morita, chief strategist in Tokyo at Barclays Capital Japan Ltd. in Tokyo. “Even with their strong ties, it’s possible Japan would consider selling U.S. Treasuries should the dollar say, halve in value.”

RTWT. If it IS the Japanese government, $134.5 billion represents about a quarter of their current holdings in U.S. bonds.

Another Bloomberg report from today:

Japan Probes Report Two Seized With Undeclared Bonds

June 12 (Bloomberg) — Japan is investigating reports two of its citizens were detained in Italy after allegedly attempting to take $134 billion worth of U.S. bonds over the border into Switzerland.

“Italian authorities are in the midst of the investigation, and haven’t yet confirmed the details, including whether they are Japanese citizens or not,” Takeshi Akamatsu, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said by telephone today in Tokyo. “Our consulate in Milan is continuing efforts to confirm the reports.”

An official at the Consulate General of Japan in Milan, who only gave his name as Ikeda, said it still hasn’t been confirmed that the individuals are Japanese. “We are in contact with the Italian Financial Police and the Italian Public Prosecutor’s Office,” Ikeda said by phone today.

The Asahi newspaper reported today Italian police found bond certificates concealed in the bottom of luggage the two individuals were carrying on a train that stopped in Chiasso, near the Swiss border, on June 3.

The undeclared bonds included 249 certificates worth $500 million each, the Asahi said, citing Italian authorities. The case was reported earlier in Italian newspapers Il Giornale and La Repubblica and by the Ansa news agency.

So it appears that the story isn’t B.S.

Tinfoil hat time?

UPDATE: More here.

Rightwing Extremist Military Veteran Lone Wolf Terrorist

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. . . shoots two guards at the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., killing one.

The Left and the media (but I repeat myself) are now touting the recent DHS “Rightwing Extremist” document as prophetic.

The guy was an 88 year-old WWII veteran and ex-con, white supremacist, holocaust denier, and general nutball. Oh, and illegally in possession of a .22 caliber rifle.

I am reminded, however, of a quote from Neil Strauss’ recent bestseller Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life:

Few of the most brutal periods in medieval history – from the sack of Rome to the early Inquisition – were as coldly barbaric as what happened in our supposedly enlightened modern Western civilization.

And though I left the (Holocaust) museum with the reassuring message that the world stood up and said “never again” to genocide, it only took a minute of reflection to realize that it happened again – immediately. In the USSR, Stalin continued to deport, starve, and send to work camps millions of minorities. As the bloody years rolled on, genocides occurred in Bangladesh in 1971, Cambodia in 1975, Rwanda in 1994, and in Bosnia in the mid 1990s.

All these genocides occurred in ordinary worlds where ordinary people went about ordinary business. The Jews were integrated into every aspect of the German social and professional strata before the Holocaust. The entire educated class in Cambodia – teachers, doctors, lawyers, anyone who simply wore glasses – was sent to death camps. And as Philip Gourevitch wrote in his book on the Rwandan massacre, “Neighbors hacked neighbors to death in their workplaces. Doctors killed their patients, and schoolteachers killed their pupils.”

—

So what I ultimately learned at the Holocaust Museum was not “never again,” but “again and again and again.”

Chew on that.