January 2010
45 posts
No Silent Fan →
Silence, as they’re fond of saying, is complicity. That’s complicity with things as they are and are going to be. When I’m loud, I’m casting a vote. I’m voting to support the continuation of things…
December 2009
33 posts
New Year's message: Tom Waits reads Bukowski's... →
A wonderful happy-new-year message, Charles Bukowski’s “The Laughing Heart”: your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. …
Top 10 (minus 7) Reasons Why We Already Live in... →
Sometimes I think we are already living in the world of The Matrix. The only thing that brings me back to reality is that I’m forty pounds away from having Neo’s trim 29-inch waist. If only I could…
Scott Brown on Why Some Memes Never Die →
With any luck, I’ll be taking my grandchildren on visits to HomeStarRunner.com. “Kids,” I’ll say, “this is what I was spending my time watching back in the day.” “You mean, while you weren’t fixing…
How to Destroy the Book, by Cory Doctorow (part... →
“You know, our job isn’t to safeguard literature for scholars. Our job is to safeguard our culture for the next civilization.” That’s what archiving and librarianship are about.
China executes British national →
Britain says China has executed a Briton convicted of drug-smuggling after rejecting a string of appeals from the British government and his relatives who say the man was mentally unstable and…
dangerous minds →
“The fact is that different offenders can exhibit the same behaviors for completely different reasons,” Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist who has been highly critical of the F.B.I.’s approach,…
Absent without leaving →
The other person like that, weirdly enough, is the madman or homeless person, who lives completely in the moment because he uses the spaces of transition as his places of residence. The street or the…
The Case of Akmal Shaikh →
Despite being given evidence of his mental condition, the Chinese authorities have refused to conduct a psychological assessment of the Briton and did not take his mental illness into account….
A Kind, Quick Note To Mariners Fans →
Yeah, so um, this is kind of awkward. Hi there, Seattle fans. How are Ichiro’s balls smelling these days? Lovely, I’m sure. Um, I know our team has been romancing your team lately, and it…
Upper Mismanagement →
By the late 1970s, top business schools began admitting much higher-caliber students than they had in previous decades. This might seem like a good thing. The problem is that these students tended to…
When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like... →
If we think of Avatar and its ilk as white fantasies about race, what kinds of patterns do we see emerging in these fantasies?
In both Avatar and District 9, humans are the cause of alien…
JOURNAL: A Quantitative Examination of Open... →
Open source warfare* is now at the top of the heap in the scientific study of conflict. A new paper showcased in Nature magazine, Common Ecology Quantifies Human Insurgency (by…
What if Earth had rings like Saturn →
This video takes such a simple idea and presents it so wonderfully. Imagine how different mankind would be if its cultures developed under Saturnian rings.
"Super Earth" Discovered Orbiting A Red Dwarf Star... →
Just 13 parsecs away, a planet astronomers are calling a “super Earth” is orbiting a dwarf star. Its radius is over twice that of Earth, and there’s something very surprising in its core. Known by the designation GJ1214b, this planet is, according to a paper published yesterday in
SUPER EMPOWERMENT: Hack a Predator Drone →
Skygrabber. $25.95 Easy to use software that enables you to hack the video feeds of US military drones (satellite dish, satellite card, and desktop computer required). Classification: DIY…
SUPER EMPOWERMENT: Hack a Predator Drone →
Skygrabber. $25.95 Easy to use software that enables you to hack the video feeds of US military drones (satellite dish, satellite card, and desktop computer required). Iraqi and Afghan…
Why Lovecraft Works →
Earlier, I noted how the American man of letters Edmund Wilson tried to put a nail in Lovecraft’s literary coffin with his excoriation of HPL’s tics as a writer and the seeming silliness of the…
Lawyers In Trouble In Chongqing →
After much pondering, Gong Gangmo finally could not stand the pressure within himself and pressed the bell to summon the police: “I have something important to say!” Gong Gangmo told the case…
The Tao of Stieb: ...Let go lightly →
This post is about the feeling that just having Doc on the team gave to Jays fans. It’s hard to explain, really. He was ours. He was our guy. He grew up in the system, a Blue Jay through and through….
Why it's time to lighten up about "weird" Japan →
A book called Crazy Wacky Theme Restaurants: Japan landed in my mailbox a couple of months ago. It’s a beautifully-designed volume full of photos and essays chronicling author La Carmina’s…
The mystery of Zomia →
What the inhabitants of Zomia, in all their diversity, broadly show, he argues, is that given sanctuary by geography, people can prove as eager to reject the basic tenets of civilization as to…
Obama's Big Sellout →
The point is that an economic team made up exclusively ofcallous millionaire-assholes has absolutely zero interest inreforming the gamed system that made them rich in the first place.”You can’t…
If You Trust Google’s Results, You Can... →
Perhaps the greatest ethos surrounding Google’s success is its — and users’ — faith in the algorithm. Users trust Google, and have faith that the results provided are accurate and helpful.
Egypt's Trash City Only Looks Like the Garbage... →
Somewhere buried under all those bags of trash is the Egyptian city of Zabbaleen, where garbage reigns supreme. It looks like an object lesson, warning us of some impending garbage apocalypse, but…
JOURNAL: Fighting an Automated Bureaucracy →
When the Taliban arrive in a village, I discovered, it takes 96 hours for an Army commander to obtain necessary approvals to act. In the first half of 2009, the Army Special Forces company I was…
Jack Terricloth is Alive and at Large in Gotham →
Film courtesy of Syndicate of Human Image Traffickers.
Many of us across the Coilhouse nation dream of becoming full-time artists, and some of us actually become so, but few follow our…
ON WAR #324: O = W →
For eight years, conservatives endured the agony of watching President George W. Bush attach the label “conservative” to a host of policies that were anti-conservative: Wilsonian wars, American…
Oh-oh, Canada →
My country seems to be slipping away in front of my very eyes.
Our proud identity, our cherished core values – never mind the vast gap between aspiration and achievement – are being turned upside…
So I got arrested by the SWAT team last night… →
If you happened to be walking by my office last night, you may have noticed a little police activity. A co-worker said she saw at least 6 SWAT, 2 uniformed officers, 2 undercover and a chopper in…
Sprint handed customer GPS data to law enforcement... →
Privacy advocates and career criminals alike are in a lather over reports that between September 2008 and October 2009, Sprint Nextel ponied up customer location data to various law…
Somali pirate stock-market: "we've made piracy a... →
Somali nautical pirates have established a stock-market where guns and cash are invested in upcoming hijackings, with shares of the proceeds returned to investors:
It is a lucrative business…