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December 23 - December 27, 2018
It’s as exhausting as dealing with an early-stage dementia sufferer—one with a trillion-pound budget and nuclear-weapons-release authority.
The indiscriminate slaughter of innocents is wasteful and unappealing—although I’m sure there are some reality TV shows that could use a supply of Hunger Games contestants, ha ha!
Sometimes he says outrageous things deliberately to smoke out flatterers and yes-men.
When you manage a rapid-reaction force you can’t afford to show any signs of stress in the workplace, because stressed-out management is contagious and degrades mission effectiveness.
The PM doesn’t really hold with new-fangled ideas like the Rights of Man (or Woman), let alone egalitarianism and democracy, but he works with what he’s got,
the stuff she amuses herself with when she’s pretending to be a rich socialite rather than the most powerful independent intelligence witch in the UK—
that nation is a shining temple to amnesia with its foundations built atop the bones of vanished empires
When you enter the USA or the UK, before you are granted admission by the passport officer, you exist in an uneasy legal limbo. You are technically outside the rule of domestic law, and your civil rights don’t quite exist. Smartphones, laptops, and personal electronics are all subject to search and seizure at the border. Bags can and will be searched. Body cavities can be searched. So if you are an illegal, carrying any equipment on the job will cause you to run an unacceptable risk of exposure.
poste restante
it’s astonishing what you can get your hands on if you buy on the big e-commerce sites and know how to use drop-shipping services. Some of the drop-shippers Derek uses will forward anything inside the continental United States. I suspect their main customer base are small-scale drug dealers.
She’s not much to look at, but in my mind’s eye she’s beautiful, a swirling vision of carmine complexity woven from the strands of a myriad of invocations, her head surrounded by a halo of crimson V-feeders so dense that she glows
Autism manifests differently between human men and women. I’ve got no previous experience of what it looks like in non-human hominids, so I’ll just have to play it by ear.
operational null hypothesis
very interesting psychological test scores. Serious executive function deficit, face blindness—not just the PHANG variety—and linguistic processing anomalies: if she were human we’d say she had autism spectrum disorder. Almost all alfär have deficient empathy—they default to sociopath, by human standards
Sociopaths battling for territory are more highly motivated to excellence if they are terrified of being taken down by their rivals, just as ordinary people are motivated by hope of a reward if their work exceeds the requirements of duty.
“I like to think that there’s lots of good stuff in the Bible. Advice and ideas that can help us lead a better life. But it’s a mixed bag. Parts of it don’t fit, other parts seem to be borrowed from other religions, or written in the third century. Then there’s the bad stuff. Cults who add their own apocrypha and outright fakes to scripture. You’ve got to exercise careful judgement, lest you follow a road signposted for heaven and wind up in hell.”
Jonquil likes clothes and men and is at home in urük society, but she’s essentially a people person. All she’s good at is manipulating victims. Yarisol, in contrast, finds humans—alfär and urük alike—enigmatic and baffling obstacles, although she can warp reality and melt flesh with a gesture. If she can turn Jonquil’s preposterous hypersocialization to her own ends, she’ll be unstoppable.
Forecasting Ops are notoriously Delphic, not to mention prone to disappearing in a maze of temporal paradoxes when the shit hits the fan.
an eerie ability to glance at a building’s floor plan and infer the likely layout and functions of the blank parts of the map, the implied spaces where secret rooms and hidden treasures lie.
“Our first priority is the same as it ever was,” he said: “survival. Not all of us, or any of us in particular, or forever, but survival is the principal goal. It’s the function of all life forms to persist for as long as possible. If nobody and nothing survives, nothing matters. And I don’t know about you, but I’m deeply uncomfortable with that.”
“We’re human, and mere survival isn’t enough,” he continued after a moment. “We have executive function and theory of mind and language. We make plans. It’s what makes our species so spectacularly successful. But we need to have some hope for the future, we need to be able to think we see light at the end of the tunnel, or we despair and we give up and then we die. If you like, our biggest adversary is our own fear.
95 percent of the time the government runs on cruise control, a huge juggernaut of bureaucracy rumbling predictably along its tracks. Even the presidency, an office freighted with a mystical level of respect by the citizenry, has so little room for maneuver that officeholders with diametrically opposite ideologies can often appear identical from outside the Beltway.
FAST: Face, Arms, Speech, Time.
We fight on so that something that remembers being human might survive.
“I did a SCUBA course once. I’m not an expert, but air consumption is one of the basics.”
the President does not rule, the President leads, within the framework defined by the Constitution.
wooden banker’s chair, a battered leather-topped desk,
(There is an International Standards Organization specification for brewing tea—ISO 3103, based on British Standards Institution BS 6008
management. The Laundry was about a different kind of risk management. The police don’t work that way, they’re about risk suppression, and clean-up afterwards, but it’s still risk-centric.”
All large organizations are either superorganisms whose cells are human bodies, or very slow artificial intelligences that use human beings as gears in the Babbage engines that run their code.
Compliance with the mile-high stack of social expectations you grow up with as a girl turns out to be mandatory if you want to get ahead in business. Be blonde, be skinny, and don’t forget to smile, bitch. Buy the right shampoo, perfume, cosmetics, dress, shoes, and you might be acceptable, but really you’re just deplorable. I worked for years in a high-visibility corporate role where I had to wear hose, heels, and lipstick to fit in. Confronting just about any manifestation of sexism, however aggressive and unpleasant, was a fast track to career failure. I’ve been walking a tightrope over a
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“I’m a fake, it’s just predator camouflage.”
by sticking to the plan even when things have begun to tilt off true, they make it easier for an adversary’s predictive assets to pin them down.
free will is the last thing the Nazgûl would want in their tools.
“They’re tradecraft rules for working in hostile territory. Assume we’re being followed, trust your gut, take nothing for granted.”
American cops are so heavily militarized these days that the only way I can tell the difference between them and the army is the color of their body armor—that, and the army is less trigger-happy.
A Concorde with a full fuel load stalls at approximately 310 kilometers per hour at standard temperature and pressure (sea level, 20 Celsius). A human body reaches terminal velocity in air at the velocity where the force acting on it due to gravitational attraction is equal to the aerodynamic drag it experiences: approximately 200 kilometers per hour if spread-eagled and at sea-level pressure, but considerably higher if streamlined, and/or at higher altitude (hence lower pressure). How much force does Jim have to exert to reach a velocity of 310 kilometers per hour at 2400 meters altitude, if
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“Isn’t the Lord of Sleep just about the most mind-mangling and sanity-destroying example of a level-six Anthropic Threat,
They sentenced me to thirty years of boredom, for—” “—Trying to change the system from within,”
The worst curse you can inflict on a monster is an excess of empathy.
In doing so they vastly exceeded their authority, going far outside the boundaries of law, and violating the Constitution by altering your memories without due process.
