freedom: it just put your ass in a biometric database
I don’t know if I’ve ever loved a news story the way that I love this one from USA Today. See, the U.S. military needs to identify insurgents in Afghanistan, so it’s using retina scanners and fingerprint scanners to build a database encompassing “all Afghan males of fighting age.” Then they lift fingerprints from a [...]
the empire has a glitch
I left one thing out of my post on Todd Purdum’s empire worship, yesterday: the main point. I got distracted by the glorious awfulness of Purdum’s ponderous paragraphs, and lost track of the indescribable blindness that he shares with the subjects of his worshipful journalism.
Purdum argues that Washington is “broken,” that procedural disfunction prevents the [...]
retail manager resigns after admitting that stores try to make money
The president of Germany resigned in shame after saying, in a speech delivered in Afghanistan, that his country was engaged in military action there in the service of its national economic interests.
It’s a scandal to openly say things that are merely and prosaically true in the very most obvious sense. The pageantry of the state [...]
losing the note, a saxophonist riffs on the theme of lost notes, finding that the riff does not cause the note to be rediscovered, but discovering that he has wandered off into a place of great purity, like a rock in a shoe that cuts your foot
It’s like, man, see, I mean, the cloud is unknowable, and so must be known in a way that unknows its knowingness of not known that blah blah fuck, but the point is that you have to know it, man, you have to see it with absolutely unflawed clarity even while you know that it [...]