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Preventative Measures and Why We Have Them
Something that's been annoying me on Twitter lately is the cries of horror and outrage that 200,000 people have been evacuated from the area around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors and that iodine tablets have been distributed. This isn't something I can address effectively in 140-character splurts, so I'll talk about it here ( Read more... ) -
Life at home
(SCENE: the living room. enochsmiles is annoying the cat, following best engineering practices.)
enochsmiles: He's such a cuddlesome beast!
(enochsmiles puts the cat on maradydd's shoulders and continues to snuggle him.)
maradydd: Will no one rid me of this cuddlesome beast?
enochsmiles: He's not the Archbishop of Catterbury! -
Funny looking line noise
So this Ukrainian dude I follow on Twitter posted a link to this diplomatic cable from Kyrgyzstan, which has all kinds of goofy looking line noise in it. In fact, even the file name is jacked up -- it should be BISHKEK, not BISHIEK, which makes me think of some town in the frozen steppes whose sole export is yaoi manga ( Read more... ) -
What Not to Do with a Subpoena
By now you've all probably heard about the court order that the U.S. Department of Justice served on Twitter last December, and which Twitter successfully fought to have unsealed so that it could notify the affected subscribers - among whom are Dutch entrepreneur and privacy activist Rop Gonggrijp, Icelandic parliament member Birgitta Jonsdottir, ( Read more... ) -
And now a public service announcement.
At the moment, all kinds of hell are raining down on Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann on Twitter over remarks Moore made on Olbermann's show regarding the rape allegations against Julian Assange. This all started when blogger Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown called Moore and Olbermann out, and escalated after Olbermann engaged and Moore ignored it. ( Read more... ) -
The Revision History of Democracy
Apart from being one of our nation's founding documents and an eloquent call to resistance against tyranny, the Declaration of Independence happens to be a great template for how to structure a logical argument as a springboard for further action. Its form is that of a syllogism, one of the oldest methods of deductive reasoning. First it ( Read more... ) -
All the Citizens' Men
I'm editing an anthology of critical responses -- both written and artistic -- to the United States diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks in November and December of this year.
Details at the link above, and under the cut. Please feel free to spread this far and wide! I'm happy to answer any questions in the comments.
( Call for Papers ) -
TSA agent? Hate your job? There's a simple solution.
Apparently TSA agents don't like the new pat-down rules either. Here are a few responses from blogger Steven Frischling's unscientific survey of 20 TSA Transportation Security Officers, highlighting the demoralizing nature of having to spend eight hours a day at work either browbeating passengers into being photographed naked or sexually assaulting ( Read more... ) -
How To Keep Voters With You Forever, or What We Talk About When We Talk About Duverger's Law
So I'm a bit late to the game with this trifecta of links, and maybe what I have to say has already been said elsewhere, but what the hell:
How To Keep Someone With You Forever -- a concise guide to some extremely effective techniques for stringing someone along in a shitty job or relationship by placing them into a "sick system". There's some ( Read more... ) -
There is a line between civility and incivility.
George Takei shows us exactly where it is.
Wishing harm on McCance would be incivil, and Takei makes that clear. But if McCance is going to show his ass, then Takei is going to call him on it, and I applaud the grace and aplomb with which he does so.
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