It's election day and you know what that means!
... Yeah, me neither.
Let's ignore that.
Random thought for today: purring and laughter both involve vibration of the rib cage and are associated with muscle relaxation and healing. Are these the same biological process? I suspect so.
Slightly less random thoughts: During my youth I was exposed to the meme that the USA was becoming decadent and degenerate like the Roman Empire and set for an equivalent fall from grace. Let's actually think about that for a moment. The city of Rome had an expansive empire for about say seven hundred years. The USA has existed for a third of that time. Rome conducted nonstop wars of conquest for centuries. The USA expanded from one side of North America to the other in the course of a century and mostly stopped growing in land area. Rome practiced slavery for it's entire span. The USA bifurcated over the slavery issue. The child mortality rate for almost all of human history was over forty percent everywhere on Earth. In the last two centuries the USA has gotten it down to less than one. I understand seeing patterns in history but try to hold on to the fact that the two entities contrasted above are fundamentally incommensurate.
Nazi Germany styled itself the Third Reich destine to endure for a thousand years. Its architecture was designed with an eye to being cool ruins someday. People get accused of failing to think about the long term but it seems to me that Hitler failed to consider the short term. He embarked on a two front war while conducting an internal genocide. If you wrote that into a story it would strain credulity and rightly so. No group that deluded could have been able to become a major threat, right? No, seriously, think about it. Germany didn't have to go to war with Russia. It worked out so badly the last time.
I find myself thinking about the literal absurdity of history when considering the apparent absurdity of the present. Reality really doesn't care what we find plausible. Whatever future you are envisioning for whatever reasons rest assured you are wrong in most of the details.
IRON NODER XVII: ALL'S FERROUS IN LOVE AND NODING