Read moreBecause we know we can never go back, we feel free to reimagine the past as a haven from of the existential horrors of The Now; dreaming about a holiday you can never take is safe, because you can never be disappointed by the reality. Yesterday’s Now isn’t so scary, firstly because its bad sides are almost unimaginable from our current vantage point of Panglossian privilege, and secondly because our very existence implies it was survivable at a civilisational scale – two certainties that The Now doesn’t deliver.
The past is a poster on your bedroom wall. Hi-ho, atemporality.
Quotes
Once mentioned as a possible contender for a post in the Obama administration or as a potential senator, the governor is now being talked about as more of an ambassador-at-large for the planet.
As of now, Schwarzenegger is offering no clues as to his future plans. During his Tweetcast he said he was thinking of writing a book, and that he was unsure if he would return to making films, as he was not sure he still had the patience to sit on a movie set for three or six months at a time.
He may prefer life on the move. Schwarzenegger was at the Copenhagen climate change summit last year, and has recently returned from China, after speaking out about its advances in clean technology. For his allies in California, a continuing environmental role does not seem far-fetched. “He has the ability to get an audience, and can attract really good people,” Epstein said.
Arnold Schwarzenegger flexes muscles to defend climate-change law | Environment | The Guardian
– Arnie as a future first world president? like, it couldn’t be any stranger than this right?
what would a steampunk novel that took the taproot history of the period seriously look like?
Forget wealthy aristocrats sipping tea in sophisticated London parlours; forget airship smugglers in the weird wild west. A revisionist mundane SF steampunk epic — mundane SF is the socialist realist movement within our tired post-revolutionary genre — would reflect the travails of the colonial peasants forced to labour under the guns of the white Europeans’ Zeppelins, in a tropical paradise where severed human hands are currency and even suicide doesn’t bring release from bondage. (Hey, this is steampunk — it needs zombies and zeppelins, right? Might as well pick Zombies for our single one impossible ingredient.) It would share the empty-stomached anguish of a young prostitute on the streets of a northern town during a recession, unwanted children (contraception is a crime) offloaded on a baby farm with a guaranteed 90% mortality rate through neglect. The casual boiled-beef brutality of the soldiers who take the King’s shilling to break the heads of union members organizing for a 60 hour work week. The fading eyesight and mangled fingers of nine year olds forced to labour on steam-powered looms, weaving cloth for the rich. The empty-headed graces of debutantes raised from birth to be bargaining chips and breeding stock for their fathers’ fortunes.
The hard edge of empire – Charlie’s Diary
– i would *so* watch that show
Read moreHere are some of the things the U.S. could do:
1. Indict Mr. Assange and his colleagues for espionage, regardless of whether he is presently in a U.S. jurisdiction, and ask our allies to do the same.
2. Explore opportunities for the president to designate WikiLeaks and its officers as enemy combatants, paving the way for non-judicial actions against them.
3. Freeze the assets of the WikiLeaks organization and its supporters, and sanction financial organizations working with this terrorist-enabling organization so they cannot clear transactions denominated in U.S. dollars.
4. Give the new U.S. Cyber-Command a chance to prove its worth by ordering it to electronically assault WikiLeaks and any telecommunications company offering its services to this organization.
5. Holding meaningful congressional hearings to look into how this much classified information could ever be compromised and how the U.S. can better identify and combat political warfare organizations like WikiLeaks.
Read moreNobody knows how many file sharers are getting warnings from France’s new P2P infringement authority, but Billboard.biz says that French labels are sending 25,000 complaints a day to Hadopi, the agency enforcing that country’s “three strikes” law.
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We’re presuming that rights holders hope that legal digital sales will go up, and alleged infringements will go down. Maybe so, but a study released just after the law’s passage last year suggested an uptick in areas the legislation doesn’t cover, like one-click downloading sites such as Rapidshare.
Read moreThus far SmartVPN has been an overwhelming success. Clever told TorrentFreak that nearly 2,500 Smartorrent users have already signed up since they started in September, and dozens of new accounts are being made each day. The torrent site run VPN, which costs 5 euros a month, ironically owes much of its success to France’s anti-piracy law.
Clever further said that he doesn’t understand why the French Government voted for the tougher laws, and calls them “insane”. “In my point of view, they have more important things to take care of in France than hunting downloaders, as every week there is a strike somewhere,” he added.
The success of SmartVPN follows the global trend where file-sharers increasingly use anonymizing services to avoid being spied on. The SmartVPN service is mainly targeted at French users, but for people from other countries there are plenty of alternatives to torrent anonymously.
I felt strongly—still do—that for this show to work you could not have it be even 80 percent about the conspiracy. And the reason is, if you do that, then you’re gonna be chasing that story all the time and it will lead you. You will have to start blowing stuff up by episode seven. Episode four was the one that I thought was a crucial test, and I thought we passed it. In that one, there was only one scene even involving the conspiracy, which takes place, as a nod to Pakula, in an underground parking garage. The rest had to do with these people and what they do, and it worked terrifically, I thought. You need to be able to put the brakes on the conspiracy story. If you can’t put the brakes on the conspiracy story it will lead you and it will lead you badly.
Rubicon executive producer Henry Bromell | TV | Interview | The A.V. Club
– it’s exactly this sort of intelligence shining through that makes this a quietly spectacular show
Read moreBut we now live in a highly mediated world with easy access to images from all eras and places. All fads are now in flux. They’re in and out at the same time; retro at the same time they become new. As such, fashion cannot be relied on. Neither avoiding nor conforming to its rules will show any sort of taste. In five years one will not look dated due to their button count, their tie width or their suit color. They will simply look good or they will look bad. Deeper principles than fashion are now at play.
Read moreSo once I’ve got my Hilux, an AK-47, a Casio F91W, and a Nokia 1100, what’s next for my Cheap ‘n’ Indestructible Third-World Chic collection?
Read moreIn the world I see – you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 