December 2009
“The first prerequisite for leading any satisfactory kind of personal life in a...”
– W. H. Auden, “Culture and Leisure” (1966) (via tilling) (via alaina)
WatchJack White voices his opinion of the outcome of the conversation about the electric guitar among Jimmy Page, The Edge and him in the documentary It Might Get Loud. Well worth watching & listening to.
formspring.me
yourwonderingmind:
lsd-tree:
oh you went to tiesto? haha i did too. :P
Yeah. In San Francisco? Did you like it? I don’t really like trance, but my friend bought my ticket and I had a good time :)
OH GEWD ONE
I think you’re just listening to the wrong trance! 9.31 gigs of Psytrance that I think you may just like.
Thanks Mind.
BTW, while we’re weening ourselves from The Pirate Bay,...
“and how the banker’s daughter ran naked on the deck
with her pink tits...”
– Dark Prophecy: I Sing Of Shine - By Etheridge Knight Quoted by Mary Karr in her memoir Lit (p. 51) .
The Big Zero - Paul Krugman →
I’d suggest that we call the decade past the Big Zero. It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true. …
Funny how that happened. For as the decade began, there was an overwhelming sense of economic triumphalism in America’s business and political establishments, a belief that we — more than anyone else in...
After Branding →
azspot:
If this is a little too abstract, let me dress it up in a numbered list, just like a self-help book title: Ten Steps To Online Success In The Post-Branded Future.
Get yourself some Web space. It’d be nice if the URL included your name; easy if you’ve got a low-frequency name, tough for Bill Smith and Sue Brown (but consider bill-smith-from-tulsa.net and similar dodges).
While having...
Field Notes Theme
I just switched to the Field Notes Theme by Manasto Jones. I like the clarity and the warmth of this theme - a difficult combination to accomplish. Though I haven’t played with the theme much, it looks like there’s plenty of flexibility and features for customization if you’re into that and a very personal connection with the designer.
“Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them...”
– Arthur Schopenhauer (via sometimesagreatnotion)
“If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly...”
– Maureen Dowd, NY Times (via underpaidgenius)
Responsibility in the Attention Economy
chrislindsay:
The Democracy in America blog at The Economist writes:
There hasn’t yet been a country in which the task of cultural formation and reproduction was so thoroughly delegated to the entertainment industry as today’s America. In a media-centric economy, the wages of contrarianism are fat. As are the wages of bombast. If sober, responsible analysis pulled in viewers, PBS and C-SPAN...
Researchers Build Anonymous, Browser-Based... →
Darknets, themselves, are nothing new; networks like Tor, FreeNet, and Gnutella are well-established. The HP researchers say Veiled is the same idea, only much simpler: It doesn’t require any software to participate, just an HTML 5-based browser. “We’ve implemented a simple, new darknet in the browser,” Matt Wood, senior security researcher in HP’s Web Security...
“Fixing the problem doesn’t mean voting out the feckless Democrats or the...”
– Lawrence Lessig (via squashed) (via marco) (via underpaidgenius)
“One wild card is how angry the American people might get. Unlike the 1930s, we...”
– James Howard Kunstler (via azspot)
Just because our conservative history books like to hide the direct action of the early 1900s doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. There wasn’t just ‘political violence’ like a G20 protest of today, it was political assassinations and beatings and bombs and daily...
“When I buy an audiobook on CD, it’s mine. The license agreement, such as it is,...”
– Cory Doctorow (via azspot)
“The concept of “no-fault” divorce is certainly repugnant to most Christian and...”
– Glenn Greenwald - Rove: Champion of “Traditional Divorce” (via apsies) (via bringmethathorizon) (via vruz)
One day we'll all be terrorists - Chris Hedges →
vruz:
vruz: First they came for the muslims… (under the pretext they were searching for terrorists).
—via afghanibanani:
Syed Fahad Hashmi can tell you about the dark heart of America. He knows that our First Amendment rights have become a joke, that habeas corpus no longer exists and that we torture, not only in black sites such as those at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or at Guantánamo...
WatchA beautiful Christmas present from my daughter Ariel who edited this video of last spring’s family gathering & just posted it. What a blessed life we lead!
“Te Haahi Tuuhauwiri has been our Maori name since 1993. It is not a translation...”
– Aotearoa Quaker Handbook (via plsj) (via clothedinsky)
“Man is born free and everywhere is in chain stores.”
– Perkus Tooth inn Jonathan Lethem’s novel “Chronic City”
Copenhagen: Where Obama Took on Africa →
Naomi Klein writes: If George W. Bush had pulled some of the things Obama has done here, he would have been burned in effigy on the steps of the convention center. With Obama, however, even the most timid actions are greeted as historic breakthroughs, or at least a good start.
David Simon Interviewed by Jesse Pearson for Vice... →
Those three guys seemed to have the perfect backgrounds to bring a lot of valuable stuff to The Wire.
It wasn’t like we were putting Isaac Bashevis Singer on staff. I love his stuff, but we were looking for novelists who were doing researched fiction, and particularly in an urban environment. I’m also not mistaking The Wire for journalism. I have too much respect for journalism to make such a...
Flashback: McCain Refused To Grant 30 Seconds Of... →
During the course of the frenzied floor debate, then-Sen. Mark Dayton (D-MN) spoke in favor of an amendment offered by Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) that would have restricted Bush’s constitutional powers to wage war against Iraq. After a minute and a half, Dayton ran out of time, prompting this exchange:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator’s time has expired.
Mr. DAYTON. I ask for unanimous consent...
Web 2.0 Suicide Machine →
This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego.