50,000 is roughly as much as all students, faculty, and staff at the University of Kentucky. The whole university gone.

I’ve been feeling like reading some Turtledove recently, but I’m a lot more mixed on him than I’ve been in the past. I read nearly this entire series back in high school and thought it might be worth revisiting. The premise of this book (World War I in a timeline where the Confederacy successfully seceded) is super interesting. Woodrow Wilson as Confederate POTUS feels plausible, as do a lot of the other details, and it’s interesting to see how the story plays out.

Russia is in the wrong in this conflict, but that also means that Russians are among those being wronged.

Interesting Book of Mormon reading here.

Thomas Merton believed that he could (and should) advocate for a clear cause even in understanding that the actual solution would be complex and that he did not therefore know the details. The most prominent of these causes was an abolition of war, and I feel like that’s more relevant than ever.

I had been reading and thinking about non-violence for months before the 2023 Israel-Hamas war started, but its outbreak is making me more committed to the idea than any abstract philosophical argument. I’m more inclined than ever before to believe that military force can never be justified, and I think that’s especially true in cases where civilians are deliberately targeted (or allowed to be caught in the attack). Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians is unjustifiable, the IDF’s seeming disregard for Gazan civilians is unjustifiable, the U.

I am only passingly familiar with Archie, but the concept behind the miniseries was compelling, and I love a reimagining of familiar characters to make a point. Even more compelling was the treatment of World War II in a way that emphasized how awful war is instead of cheerleading the U.S. entry into the conflict. Really enjoyed this.

This book took me a while to get into. I gave up on the print version a year or three ago, and even the audiobook wasn’t doing great at capturing my attention for a while—I had to rush to finish this before it was due back to Libby. I’m glad that I stuck it out, though, because I liked what I got. I never read the X-Wing novels from the old EU, but I wanted something like what I imagined they were.

Okay, no more caveats. I’m really into this series now. The themes (the difficult love of family and the creeping destruction of war) are more clear, and the art and weirdness continue to be excellent.

Yemen has been on my mind a lot since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but mostly because I’m belatedly realizing I haven’t been paying attention. It’s not that Ukraine doesn’t deserve our attention, it’s that Yemen has long deserved just as much. There, we’re the ones complicit in civilian deaths, and we need to own up to that.

The Onion speaks uncomfortable truth. Americans must hold Putin accountable, but we meed to turn our attention inward, too.

Lots of important reminders in here. I also feel ashamed that I have not protested my country’s wars in the way these Russians are doing so now.

The thing about Rand Paul is that sometimes he gets things very right, even though he so often gets things so wrong.

What a heartbreaking story. We need to rethink our relationship with drones—and war.

A very powerful read. I was not politically confident as a teenager, but I remember already feeing uneasy with how the attacks were being evoked within a couple of years. A couple of decades later, I think we all need to be asking the hard questions.

Sobering read.

What a gut-wrenching story. Drone strikes are bad news.