A thought for 2011 from the smartest guy on the planet. OK, one of the smartest … EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Archives for 2010
Sprechen Sie Deutsch?
Click for the TV interview. It’s in German. In this TV interview about the German literary scene, old amigo Carl Weissner, author of Death in Paris and Manhattan Muffdiver — and translator of too many books to list — sounds as if he’s sitting in a bar gossiping about gangsters. “Right,” he messages in an […]
‘Courage Is Contagious’
Julian Assange speaks to David Frost. A friend writes: “I see an escalating need for him to break himself down to subatomic particles and travel by solar wind…” (For continuing updates go to Nemesis a k a Mr. Wikileaks and scroll down.) EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Greenwald to Krugman to Orwell to Osborne
Here’s Joe “Good Guy” Biden contradicting himself about Wikileaks. Sickening isn’t it. Thank you, Glenn Greenwald. (Update: Dec. 19 — Really sickening, to say nothing of U.S. officials calling European standards for human rights an “irritant.”) Which brings me to Paul Krugman’s blogpost “Decade of the Living Dead.” Krugman’s blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, […]
Wikileaks Wrap
The roundup and the rap continue … EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Riots in the Streets vs. Internet Attacks
Violence in the streets scares the shit out of the authorities. More than guerrilla geeks, student rioters in the streets send the authorities into a panic, making them so repressive that the violence boomerangs. The authorities lose control of the situation and whatever moral highground they may claim. Guerrilla geeks also frighten the authorities, but […]
Re Wikileaks, Remember What Mario Savio Said
Is Operation Payback “the first great cyber war” or just a “major shitstorm?” Are the mounting cyberattacks in support of Wikileaks something like the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s? Remember Mario Savio? Remember his prescient speech on the UC Berkeley campus in 1964? There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes […]
Editorial Substance vs. Online Style
Here’s one way the print version of a daily newspaper beats the online version. Paul Krugman’s NYT column this morning, Freezing Out Hope, begins: After the Democratic “shellacking” in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he […]
Nemesis a k a Mr. Wikileaks
Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks. The U.S. government doesn’t think so, of course. It is frantic about today’s “expected release of up to three million confidential diplomatic communiques by the Wikileaks website.” (Scroll down for continuing updates.) Update: “US embassy cables: browse the database” — via The Guardian WASHINGTON — A cache of […]
Vintage Burroughs … No Miracles Here
It’s the week of Thanksgiving, after all: Words of Gratitude. And here’s more Burroughs … on Jesus … the A-Bomb … the Titanic … Doctor Benway … you get the idea. It’s a 1989 reading. He was doing perfected shtick by then. The automatic audience adulation, which was unavoidable under the circumstances — he was […]
Old Evidence Rediscovered
This report from Athens under the Greek military junta 42 years ago turned up in a batch of old letters and postcards that a friend found the other day in a forgotten file. “How I come to have it,” he writes, “is a mystery.” Well, mystery solved: He and I were doing VDRSVP at the […]
Book Sex
Kant was also born in 1724, a coincidence not lost on Editions Silverbridge, the French publisher of Birth of the Cunt. The video was recorded Nov. 5, 2010, at the fifth annual NY Art Book Fair, taking place this weekend at MoMA P.S. 1 in Queens, New York. On the soundtrack that’s Spike Wilner noodling […]
Unindicted War Criminal Back on the Air
…and Matt Lauer is his enabler. “I really don’t care about perceptions at this point in time. … I’m a content man.”— George W. Bush Postscript: Nov. 7 — It’s worth mentioning Robert Fisk’s perceptions in this context. He writes almost daily, and his stuff is incomparable. These two recent columns are just two back-to-back […]
Ted Sorensen, R.I.P.
Gone. He was a real mensch. I had a short conversation with him in 2006 and asked him a few questions on the chance that he’d actually give me an answer. Which he did. This is what he said: Ted Sorensen’s Italics and Starry Rearview Mirror. (Crossposted at HuffPo) Postscript: Nov. 3 — And now […]
Typographically Speaking …
Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography – Language from Matthew Rogers on Vimeo. Thanks for the tip, Tom. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
From Wikileaks
Via the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Thank you. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
‘That’s RepubliCorp!’
Here’s the launch video: And here’s their Web site. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit