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I’m sorry, but did I just hear that someone is running on a platform of tightening up border controls because highway congestion in Los fr’n Angeles is the result of too many illegal immigrants?
Tell me that was just a fever dream. Please.
But then again, as I was trying to stop thinking about JavaScript very early […]

Hey, yeah, so, Granite Shadow.
Arkin sounds comparatively rational (in his inaugural entry, he says his “basic philosophy is that government is more incompetent than diabolical”), but many of the comments on Arkin’s post bear the hallmarks of paranoid schizophrenic delusions.
The bane of conspiracies is that people just aren’t very good at keeping secrets. (This is […]

By now, you’re probably sick of seeing photos, whether real or artfully faked, that protray the administrative incompetence and errors of judgment that have characterized the response to the New Orleans disaster.
And like most of them, this one relies on the fundamentally dangerous trope that Dubya is simply “simple” — dangerous because it’s the ways […]

note: I wouldn’t, personally, consider this safe-for-work. there aren’t any unsafe pictures, however, just words.
it’s funny because it hurts
(tip o’ the hat to the great leap forward.)

I never made it through a whole Clancy novel, but I think I grasp the basic formula anyway: a bunch of factual background + some more-or-less plausible speculation + a chain of innocent-seeming coincidences = a thriller. Clancy, obviously, is hawkish, implicitly conservative, explicitly technophilic.
This is an idea for a techno/political thriller rooted in somewhat […]

Considerable blather I wanna inflict on y’all, but a paucity of typing time. Mebbe over the weekend, although it looks to be a busy one.
In the meantime, quickly: we watched Team America: World Police. I had extremely mixed feelings about it, mostly because while it certainly was a parody of jingoist warmongering action flicks, I’m […]

Huzzah to Boston Globe for daring to print author Ross Gelbspan’s op-ed piece, the first (to the best of my knowledge) in a major mainstream US media outlet to connect the dots. The severity of the damage done by Katrina is related to the storm’s total energy, which is related to the temperature of […]

I got nothing insightful or useful to say about Katrina and its aftermath. I can’t begin to get my head around the magnitude of it. I will almost certainly continue to blither about things that seem trivial by comparison because, you know, that’s what blithering idiots do — we blither.
The band and I are kicking […]