Items: bodies, creating and disposing of
These don't quite have a unified theme, but they seem distantly connected:
- Ted pointed to a great MetaFilter thread on how to dispose of a body. It provides some useful (and scary) advice for those of you writing fiction involving disposing of bodies, and it manages to be very funny too.
- Gwenda pointed to (and Susan repointed to) a guide to disappearing without a trace in the modern US. Interestingly, the author indicates that if you're wanted for criminal activity, you're probably out of luck. Other than that aspect, it reads a lot like the somewhat loony-sounding but nonetheless compelling books I used to see advertised in Loompanics catalogs.
- "Marine general says shooting some is 'fun'." Lt. Gen. James Mattis said to an audience on Tuesday, among other things, "It's fun to shoot some people. . . . You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." Best doublethink response: Gen. Mike Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps, defended Mattis by saying that, as the article puts it, "the commitment of Marines 'helps to provide us the fortitude to take the lives of those who oppress others or threaten this nation's security. This is not something we relish, yet we accept it as a reality in our profession of arms.'" I'm not quite sure how he gets from "a hell of a lot of fun" to "not something we relish."
