hotels with a neon sign blinking through the window

Film noir is...

(1) A French term meaning "black film," or film of the night, inspired by the Series Noir, a line of cheap paperbacks that translated hard-boiled American crime authors and found a popular audience in France.
(2) A movie which at no times misleads you into thinking there is going to be a happy ending.
(3) Locations that reek of the night, of shadows, of alleys, of the back doors of fancy places, of apartment buildings with a high turnover rate, of taxi drivers and bartenders who have seen it all.
(4) Cigarettes. Everybody in film noir is always smoking, as if to say, "On top if everything else, I'e been assigned to get through three packs today." The best smoking movie of all time is Out of the Past, in which Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoke furiously at each other. At one point Mitchum enters a room, Douglas extends a pack and says, "Cigarette?" and Mitchum, holding up his hand, says, "Smoking."
(5) Women who would just as soon kill you as love you, and vice versa.
(6) For women: low necklines, floppy hats, mascara, lipstick, dressing rooms, boudoirs, calling the doorman by his first name, high heels, red dresses, elbow-length gloves, mixing drinks, having gangsters as boyfriends, having soft spots for alcoholic private eyes, wanting a lot of someone else's women, sprawling dead on the floor with every limb meticulously arranged and every hair in place.
(7) For men: fedoras, suits and ties, shabby residential hotels with a neon sign blinking through the window, buying yourself a drink out of the office bottle, cars with running boards, all-night diners, protecting kids who shouldn't be playing with the big guys, being on first-name terms with homicide cops, knowing a lot of people whose descriptions end in ies, such as bookies, newsies, junkies, alkies, jockeys, and cabbies.
(8) Movies either shot in black and white or feeling like they were.
(9) Relationships in which love is the only final flop card in the poker game of death.
(10) The most American film genre, because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear, and betrayal, unless it were essentially naive and optimistic.

- Roger Ebert, "A Guide to Film Noir Genre"

A photograph

"A photograph is a secret about a secret." - Diane Arbus

an afternoon to read

US policymakers reacted in shock over what they denounced as Japan's unprovoked attack [on Pearl Harbor]. For being so starkly surprised, however, they had no one to blame but themselves. Had they taken an afternoon to read Thucydides and to think about the consequences of Athen's Megarian Decree, or reflect on Britain's efforts to contain the rise of Germany in the decade after 1914, they could have better anticipated Japan's initiative...

- Graham Allison, Destined For War

The only lesson

Like other practicing historians, I am often asked what the "lessons of history" are. I answer that the only lesson I have learnt from studying the past is that there are no permanent winners and losers.

- Ramachandra Guha

Only the dead

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

- George Santayana

and indeed are forced to do so...

Indeed, the kind of minimal or no-government societies envisioned by dreamers of the Left and Right are not fantasies; they actually exist in the contemporary developing world. Many parts of sub-Saharan Africa are a libertarian's paradise. The region as a whole is a low-tax utopia, with governments often unable to collect more than about 10 percent of GDP in taxes, compared to more than 30 percent in the United States and 50 percent in parts of Europe. Rather than unleashing entrepreneurship, this low rate of taxation means that basic public services like health, education, and pothole filling are starved of funding. The physical infrastructure on which a modern economy rests, like roads, court systems, and police, are missing. In Somalia, where a strong central government has not existed since the late 1980s, ordinary individuals may own not just assault rifles but also rocket-propelled grenades, antiaircraft missiles, and tanks. People are free to protect their own families, and indeed are forced to do so. ...

- Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order

intolerable multitude in volumes

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man, who has read steadily that which he ought to have read sixteen hours a day, from early infancy. … My leisure has been moderate, my desire strong and steady, my taste in selection certainly above average, and yet in ten years I seem scarcely to have made an impression upon the intolerable multitude in volumes which ‘everyone is supposed to have read.

- Arnold Bennett, as quoted on futilitycloset.com

the faith in human goodness

...the liberal faith is not merely unsupported by the available facts but inconsistent with them as well. The facts are that evil is prevalent in all human societies; the vices of selfishness, greed, malevolence, envy, aggression, prejudice, cruelty, and suspicion motivate people just as the contrary virtues do; and both virtues and vices may be autonomous or nonautonomous, natural and basic, or the products of external influences. It would be as implausible to claim that these facts testify to human wickedness as it is to base the faith in human goodness on them. If the facts warrant any inference, it is that human beings are morally ambivalent.

The liberal faith, however, flatters humanity by painting a rosy picture of wonderful possibilities, while neglecting the hard facts that it cannot accommodate. It is a sentimental falsification that substitues illusion for reality....

- John Kekes, Against Liberalism, 40.

Any full analysis of patriarchy

Any full analysis of patriarchy should take into account the veiling, sequestering, and regimentation of women in Muslim societies; the tradition of foot binding in China; the suttee tradition of the Indian subcontinent; the deeply institutionalized practice of clitoridectomy among many cultures in 26 different nations across the African continent, a mutilation affecting 2 million girls each year; the near ubiquitousness of wife beating around the world; and the fact that polygyny - multiple wives - is an accepted practice in far more cultures than not. It ought to examine the fact that 67 percent of married women in Papua New Guinea describe themselves as battered, with at least one in five hurt severely enough to require hospitalization at least once. It should note that in Pakistan the mortality rate for girls is half again as high as that for boys, who are better fed; and that in many parts of Africa and the Middle East women cannot visit health clinics without their husbands' permission. We might hear more about the problem of patriarchy outside the West if more non-Western women were freer from grinding poverty and, in some instances, rigid cultural restrictions against expressing themselves. In Bangladesh, one must remember, feminist poet Taslima Nasrin has been placed under fatwah, the Muslim death sentence, for writing the wrong thing.

- from Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham, 1996

Do you really think a God who created the universe, billions of galaxies, stars, billions of planets- would promise to reward some little things in a pale blue dot (i.e Earth) for repeatedly saying that he is the greatest and kindest and for fasting? Such a great creator can't be so narcissist!

-Taslima Nasrin

The peculiarity of the whole affair was its needlessness

The peculiarity of the whole affair was its needlessness, and this underlines two characteristics of folly: it often does not spring from a great design, and its consequences are frequently a suprise. The folly lies in persisting thereafter. With acute if unwitting significance, a French historian wrote of the Revocation that "Great designs are rare in politics; the King proceeded empirically and sometimes impulsively." His point is reinforced from an unexpected source in a perceptive comment by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who cautioned, "In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial." This is a factor usually overlooked by political scientists who, in discussing the nature of power, always treat it, even when negatively, with immense respect. They fail to see it as sometimes a matter of ordinary men walking into water over their heads, acting unwisely or foolishly or perversely as people in ordinary circumstances frequently do. The trappings and impact of power deceive us, endowing the possessors with a quality larger than life. Shorn of his tremendous curled peruke, high heels and ermine, the Sun King was a man subject to misjudgment, error and impulse - like you and me.

- Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly. 

A cheering section

Women have very rarely engaged in combat, but have often played auxiliary roles in mobilization and logistics. Before hostilities commenced, they might shame cowards, taunt the hesitant, and participate in dances of incitement. Among some groups, women have accompanied war parties to carry weapons and food. During combat, they might serve as a cheering section, supply first aid, or collect spent enemy missiles to resupply their own warriors....

from War Before Civilization, Lawrence Keeley, 35.

Method?

Prince Wen Hui's cook
Was cutting up an ox.
Out went a hand,
Down went a shoulder,
He planted a foot,
He pressed with a knee,
The ox fell apart
With a whisper,
The bright cleaver murmered
Like a gentle wind.
Rhythm! Timing!
Like a sacred dance,
Like "The Mulberry Grove,"
Like ancient harmonies!

"Good work!" the Prince exclaimed,
"Your method is faultless!"
"Method?" said the cook
Laying aside his cleaver,
"What I follow is Tao
Beyond all methods!

"When I first began
To cut up oxen
I would see before me
The whole ox
All in one mass.
After three years
I no longer saw this mass.
I saw the distinctions.

"But now I see nothing
With the eye. My whole being
Apprehends.
My senses are idle. The spirit
Free to work without plan
Follows its own instinct
Guided by natural line,
By the secret opening, the hidden space,
My cleaver finds its own way.
I cut through no joint, chop no bone.

"There are spaces in the joints;
The blade is thin and keen:
When this thinness
Finds that space
There is all the room you need!
It goes like a breeze!
Hence I have this cleaver nineteen years
As if newly sharpened!

"True, there are sometimes
Tough joints. I feel them coming,
I slow down, I watch closely,
Hold back, barely move the blade,
And whump! the part falls away
Landing like a clod of earth.

"Then I withdraw the blade,
I stand still
And let the joy of the work
Sink in.
I clean the blade
And put it away."

Prince Wen Hui said,
"This is it! My cook has shown me
How I ought to live
My own life!"

- Chuang Tzu, 369 - 286 BC, as quoted in Wherever You Go There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn

Wise leeches

Last-minute negotiations having failed to avert conflict, the battle [of Shrewsbury] began about midday on 21 July 1403 with a hail of arrows from the veteran bowmen of the prince's own county palatine of Cheshire. Unfortunately for him, they had taken the rebel side and he was on the receiving end. As the royal army struggled up the slope, the Welsh and Cheshire archers drew 'so fast that...the sun which at that time was bright and clear then lost its brightness so thick were the arrows' and Henry's men fell 'as fast as leaves fall in autumn after the hoar-frost'. An arrow struck the sixteen-year-old prince full in the face but he refused to withdraw, fearing the effect it would have on his men. Instead he led the fierce hand-to-hand fighting that continued until nightfall...

A way had to be found of extracting the arrow that had entered his face on the left side of his nose. The shaft was successfully removed but the arrowhead remained embedded six inches deep in the bone at the back of his skull. Various 'wise leeches' or doctors were consulted and advised 'drinks and other cures', all of which failed. In the end it was the king's surgeon, a convicted (but pardoned) coiner of false money, John Bradmore, who saved the prince and the day. He devised a small pair of hollow tongs the width of the arrow-head with a screw-like thread at the end of each arm and a separate screw mechanism running through the centre. The wound had to be enlarged and deepened before the tongs could be inserted and this was done by means of series of increasingly large and long probes...When Bradmore judged that he had reached the bottom of the wound he introduced the tongs at the same angle as the arrow had entered, placed the screw in the centre and manouevred the instrument into the socket of the arrowhead. 'The, by moving it to and fro, little by little (with the help of God) I extracted the arrowhead.' ...

The pain the prince must have suffered in the course of this lengthy operation is unimaginable...

- from Agincourt by Juliet Barker

It is not difficult to imagine

It is not difficult to imagine how this scenario [war with North Korea] could come to pass. ... Imagine that Kim and Trump arrive at the summit only to discover that they hold radically different views of the commitment to "denuclearize": Trump believes that Kim is willing to negotiate away his arsenal for sanctions relief, whereas Kim believes that full denuclearization also requires the removal of U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula and and end to the U.S.-South Korean alliance... . After it becomes clear that Trump will not move forward on Kim's terms, Kim is outraged and renews his August 2017 pledge to test missiles over Guam.

Both Washington and Pyongyang now think the other is responsible for derailing diplomacy. Out of a desire to induce the United States to drop its denuclearization demands, Kim decides to show that his willingness to negotiate does not mean his will has been broken, and he proceeds with his missile launch. Much as the Japanese did before they attacked Pearl Harbor, he hopes that a missile test over Guam - a U.S. territory but not a state - will unnerve the United States enough to persuade it to accept his nuclear program, but not so much as to bring a full-scale war.

But then, one of his missiles expels debris over Guam. Fragments from the reentry vehicle strike the island itself, killing a few residents - who are, after all, U.S. citizens. Trump declares this "an act of war" and gives Kim 48 hours to issue a formal apology and a pledge to denuclearize. Kim does not comply, and the United States dusts off one of its plans for a limited military strike. It attacks a known missile storage facility, believing the limited nature of the target will induce Kim's cooperation and minimize the risk of retaliation. Instead, Kim views the strike as the beginning of a larger effort to disarm him and as a prelude to regime change. Following his conventional bombardment of Seoul, the United States begins to attack other known weapons sites and command-and-control facilities to neutralize the threat. Kim launches nuclear weapons the following day.

- from "Perception and Misperception on the Korean Peninsula," Robert Jervis and Mira Rapp-Hooper, in Foreign Affairs, May/June 2018, pg. 116

They were the same people before

Think, for example, of John Wayne Gacy, [...] Ted Bundy, [...] and Kenneth Bianchi.

We now diagnose most of these people as psychopaths, but the crucial point here is that their disorder and its behavior did not suddenly appear full-blown out of nowhere. They were the same people before they were caught as they were afterward. They are psychopaths now and they were psychopaths before.

This is a disturbing thought, because it suggests that the cases that come to the public's attention represent only the tip of a very large iceberg.

The rest of the iceberg is to be found nearly everywhere - in business, the home, the professions, the military, the arts, the entertainment industry, the news media, academe, and the blue-collar world. Millions of men, women, and children daily suffer terror, anxiety, pain, and humiliation at the hands of the psychopaths in their lives.

Tragically, these victims often cannot get other people to understand what they are going through...

- from Without Conscience, Robert D. Hare, 115