It's almost the 30th anniversary of the Falkands War! If you forget why that war was fought, well, let old Maggie explain it to you: "We fought to show that aggression does not pay and that the robber cannot be allowed to get away with his swag." So to celebrate, England is sending over the HMS Dauntless, which is "'armed with a battery of missiles that could "take out all of South America's fighter aircraft let alone Argentina's,' according to one Navy source." They will retain these thoroughly crappy little islands off the coast of Argentina! Who wouldn't want them? Meanwhile, it's a war of words between the two weirdo nations about who's actually a colonialist. Yay, war! Let's nuke something.

They're just sitting there... WAITING. I don't like it one bit.

"A wave of coordinated explosions ripped across Baghdad early on Thursday, killing at least 63 people, wounding more than 180." READ MORE

And now we get to prematurely place behind us another quite troubling incident in our recent history. Secret prisons? Eh, let's forget about those. Torture? Let's just move on. A incredible transformation of huge chunks of the military into a privately contracted mercenary army? La la la la la! Years and years of National Guard reservists being unexpectedly called up for active duty in Iraq? Oh well! Thousands of soldiers having had their service contracts forcibly extended, creating a stop-lossed conscription army, under a policy that somehow no judge would find illegal? Sorry guys and gals! (And sorry families of dead guys and gals.) Operation New Dawn: the war we had after the war? Deadly. A decade of a wildly, wildly, crushingly expensive invasion, that involved more than a million Americans in combat, and the occupation of a country under false pretenses? Let's just agree to not talk about it anymore. The CNN crawl says "Ceremony Ends Nine Years of Conflict," which isn't actually what happened either: we actually didn't have a "conflict." America's great at putting things behind us, so guess we'll just file this under "things that are already over," though we still have billions of dollars to spend in ongoing operations. But at least we should let the Iraq War have an asterisk for "things that should never have happened." READ MORE

John Cook's 4500-page Blackwater document dump is incredibly engrossing. These little stories! It's like, "we shot this dude's car, then everything was okay." What a nightmare Baghdad must have been (for Iraqis, I mean).

"I don’t know of any architects out there who want to kill birds." READ MORE

"Airmindedness” is a term that used to be everywhere and now it's nowhere. The word, as defined by the OED, means an interest in and enthusiasm for the use and development of aircraft. The expression emerged with the development of the airplane in the early twentieth century, during which an entire generation struggled to expand their conceptual boundaries skywards. Prompted by the invention of mechanical flight, this airminded cultural moment was sustained by the military incentives that ceaselessly pushed for improvements to air power. READ MORE

"Executive Outcomes was hired by several African governments during the 1990s to put down rebellions and protect oil and diamond reserves; it did not stage coup attempts." READ MORE

Things in Libya are... God, this is depressing. But we've apparently done great damage to Gaddafi's Bab al-Azizya compound! Take that, books and files! Worry not, Lindsey Graham and John McCain are out agitating for us to just assassinate Gaddafi. (I'm pretty sure that's what "cut the head of the snake off" means.) You know: the American way. READ MORE