David Chasteen is a veteran of the CIA, who has also served in combat with the United States Army in Iraq, and elsewhere.
David just tweeted what amounts to the best response I’ve seen yet to
Gina Haspel’s behavior during her Senate confirmation hearing earlier
this week. Didn’t watch it on CSPAN or read the hot takes? Here’s what
she did: deny, obfuscate, justify, lie.
Haspel is President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Central Intelligence
agency. She was involved in the destruction of CIA tapes that
documented waterboarding of war-on-terror detainees, and she was
involved in other agency endeavors that amounted to torture.
Haspel this week said torture is passé, and she wouldn’t okay it now as
CIA chief. This former rank-and-file CIA guy calls BS.
During
CIA training in 2013, I was instructed that CIA officers are allowed to
violate US law while conducting operations. I pushed back against this
interpretation during class and was reprimanded for doing so. I have no
reason to believe that that training has changed.
In
the Army, I received training on not just my right but my
responsibility to disobey unlawful or immoral orders. No such training
was part of the CIA’s curriculum for DO officers during my tenure from
2006 to 2014. This is not part of the culture.
All
nations’ intelligence agencies (and armies) break FOREIGN laws because
espionage (and invasion) isn’t legal. That’s par for the course. But
where soldiers have a rich tradition of moral philosophy, the CIA tends
to respond with “we were just following orders.”
We
hanged Nazis who used this defense. If the CIA is going to inculcate a
tradition of respect for the rule of law, it’s going to require a
significant change in curriculum and some intelligence equivalent of
courts martial empowered to actually enforce that law in the field.
We all know quails as those dough bodied little birds with a single dongle growing out of their heads. But did you know that the California quail [Callipepla californica] also likes to roll in the dirt? The act of dust bathing is a communal activity that helps the quails keep their feathers clean from parasites, and is so enjoyed by them that some ornithologists can tell when a quail has been nearby just by looking for the craters left behind after a quail has finished its “bath”. Images by
Bugs Bunny could singlehandedly defeat Thanos by dressing up as a TSA agent and setting up a metal detector in the middle of the battlefield saying that all metal objects must be removed if you want to pass on through now stick around for my 2,000 word essay on just how effectively he would convince The Mad Titan to comply
“For shame, doc! Dontcha know we got other folks waiting?”
(Thanos looks behind him and sees dozens of Bugs Bunnies dressed as angry yelling travelers with huge bags of luggage. Thanos rubs his neck guiltily and begins sliding off the gauntlet)
I felt compelled
I don’t think I’ve seen such a finely crafted Looney Toons joke in over two decades. Bravo.
Full Disclosure, I’ve failed English Three Times and I’m mostly publishing this ask so someone more qualified can answer but:
I think Octopus is greek, like Oedipus. Octopi would be the latin-style pluralization, and incorrect. Octopodes is correct but not commonly used, Octopuses is also correct and more commonly used.
Your Best Bet, I think is to email your teacher and ask how to sort out the problem of picking the right plural so you have the tools to do it right in the future. Which will 1. give you the right plural, 2. emage with your teacher in a way that makes you look really good and 3. let you pick the right plural again in the future!
Octopus is a modern English word put together from Greek roots. The plural of the Greek -pus (foot) is indeed -podes, so if you’re being excruciatingly pedantic (as I almost always am), it is Etymologically Correct. It’s also the last of the three plurals to appear in English. 😛
Octopuses is a perfectly correct English plural form of an English word.
Octopi is an abomination, a Latin plural ending on a Greek stem, but by the rules of descriptivism, is also correct English, because it is very commonly used.
So yeah, ask your teacher which one they want you to use (not which one is right, which one they prefer).
