Scum. And there were probably thousands of rescuers who would happily have helped save these dogs, if only the business owners/managers would have bothered.
18 CommentsMonth: January 2011
Seems that Facfebook gets all the press when it comes to online privacy. But it’s time to put in a bad word for Etsy, too. Now, maybe you don’t hang out at Etsy, which is, after all, an arts & crafts bazaar that may be of limited interest to the techies and political types hereabouts. But it appears that Etsy might be interested in you, even if you’ve never heard of it. This week, Etsy members are all getting emails that say (as if speaking to extraordinarily stupid kindergarteners): “Right now it’s hard to find people you know on Etsy,…
14 CommentsFor Egyptians now. Might come in handy for us later. Well, except for that one part. Sure do hope somebody posts a translation of the whole thing, not just these excerpts.
3 CommentsHow Egypt switched off the ‘Net. And how Egyptians — and hacktivists the world over — are routing around the damage. (ADDED: And here’s yet another way — thanks to engineers at Google and Twitter.) “Anonymous: A net gain for liberty.” Dmitry Orlov is interesting and the wording of the headline may be misleading. But why should anyone have to have faith in any human institution? How about confidence, suspicion, contempt, etc. based on performance? “What is a gold standard?” Interesting to see the mainstream financial media finally beginning to address the question without immediately tossing out words like “fringe,”…
13 CommentsDespite careful efforts to ensure protection for the truthtellers, David Codrea reports that the ATF is already harrassing the Project Gunwalker whistleblowers. (Thanks to EL for the bad word. And kudos to Codrea and Mike Vanderboegh for their original and continuing reporting on Project Gunwalker.)
2 CommentsBitcoin. An anonymous somebody dropped this link into a recent comments sections. Would any of you techies or econ experts out there care to comment on it? I’ve become so inherently distrustful of new online money systems after watching so many fall (and one fall with my money in it) that I admit I no longer even try to evaluate them. I figure they’ll eventually evaluate themselves via their success or failure in the real world. This one’s … different. And of course, one day one or more of them will succeed. And change the world. Probably not this one.…
17 CommentsFew days ago, for reasons that escape me, I got curious about the fate of Laissez Faire City. If you’ve been around a while you might remember LFC as a hopeful and apparently well-funded effort to build a libertarian community in Costa Rica. That is, a hopeful, well-funded, and unfortunately badly “mis-mangled” project that died aborning. Wanting to see if there were any shreds of it remaining, I googled it startpaged it duckduckgoed it and found, sadly though not surprisingly, that it has disappeared without a ripple. The ‘Net that Never Forgets has forgotten it. Even its Wikipedia entry simply…
15 CommentsI think it was a book. Might have been a novella. Definitely not a short story. In any case, it was delightful, but I read it so many years ago that I can’t remember the author or the title. Can you help me find it? Joel blogging about the mysterious causes of World War I — ultimately tracing back to the personal quirks and insecurities of the so-called leaders — got me started & you’ll see why. The plot: Aliens crash-land on earth near the beginning of the twentieth century, A crucial part on their ship is damaged (I’ll call…
20 CommentsKitty Antonik Wakfer whacks all of us who say we support WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning, but who haven’t cancelled our Amazon and PayPal accounts or cut up our MasterCards and Visas. She does one very good thing, which is to provide a list of possible payment alternatives — even if many of them haven’t reached the point of sustainability (and may never) and others aren’t really applicable. But the whole piece also does one very bad thing. It implies that because she has chosen the course of boycotting businesses on behalf of WikiLeaks, others who haven’t are wrongheaded at best,…
31 CommentsMS Jordan posted in the comments section yesterday about Phil Mocek, the Seattle man just acquitted of four counts stemming from his polite refusal to show ID at the Albuqueuque, NM, airport. There’ve been a quite a few blips of info on Mocek, but this news story, with its video and links to earlier stories about Mocek, gives the best look I’ve found so far. Took the jury all of an hour. No surprise. As usual the police/TSA account of Mocek “shouting” and creating a disturbance turns out to be a pack of lies. And as usual, the “authorities” didn’t…
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