They Thought There Were Free Toys

I’ve just ordered a Kindle and finished a review of (warning: spoilers, big-assed swastika on the front cover) They Thought They Were Free, a book about ordinary people in Germany who became Nazis that’s been on my list for a long while after it made the rounds on some of the lefty blogs I read. […]

Fixing the Internets

Stealing fromA mashup of Sadly, No! and Slashdot…

Train Of The Damned

[I’ll probably end up delivering this onstage either tomorrow or next week.] It’s 9:28 PM Commuter train of the damned Slaving away for machines Which do our thinking for us Which is what this is all about… Evolution… It’s 9:32 PM Commuter train of the damned Soon to be boarding A motly crew of the […]

Whee

A few months ago, I was supposed to get some help on my job. Specifically, someone to work on the .NET side of things, which would free me up to do the job I was actually hired to do: PHP development. He wasn’t my first choice, but he was second, in large part because of […]

The Use of Color

In an earlier post, I had noted that I would write some more on a photograph I had posted to provide a graphic illustration of the kinds of regimes that decided on trials when it was in the best interest of the state, rather than, for example, the interests of justice. When you look at […]

Dangerous Territory

via Rad Geek: Inskeep If you’re an enemy combatant, who decides if you ever get a full-blown trial—a military commission trial as it’s been called? Fmr. Bush Counsel Yoo That’s ultimately up to the President. I think it’s still up to the President and the Secretary of Defense who’s going to be tried by a […]

Dying Democracy and Dehumanization

Last Wednesday night, I was calling friends to try and do a little street theater downtown Chicago, in the hopes of providing a particularly gritty infomercial and generating pressure on the Senate to not pass S.3930 (aka the “Just Confess to Something Act of 2006″). It appears I wasn’t the only one with the same […]

Armed Madhouse

Yesterday, I read Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse. On the one hand, it’s nice to know that I intuitively understood the neo-conservative invasion plan and reason—the so-called “Plan B”—well enough to describe it as “globalization by force” in a paper I wrote for a Political Economy course. It’s also nice to know the vaunted-but-ignored State Department […]

Oh. My. God.

Blackwater USA is currently attempting to market a clothing line. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who has ever actually seen Head Office all the way through. Allow me some reminiscing… [insert wavy flashback lines here] Jane Caldwell: Don’t fall for it, Jack. Jack Issel: Fall for what? Jane Caldwell: For the lie we […]

No Santa

I started writing this post to point out that the coordinated demands by virtually every major nutcase over the New York Times’ revealing the data-mining of banking records via SWIFT—the calls for execution, harassment, lynching, etc.—was a clear indication that Karl Rove is no longer a target of Fitzgerald’s investigation. The much-vaunted “Fitzmas” is over, […]

Fear, Laziness, or N/A

Inspired from from a comment on Ezra Klein: A Bit More On Gore, I went looking for Sartre, first as a tool in service of blame, until about three paragraphs in, when it became a tool in service of knowledge. This caught my eye: Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish Fascism, […]