Just finished reading Daniel Ellsberg's "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers" -- a really great book, and a sad reminder that the institutional bureaucracy of the US government is capable of enormous evil.
There is no meaningful comparison between 2,000,000 dead in Indochina and the NSA PRISM program, but the mechanisms that kept us in Vietnam for 25 years are alive and well, and just as much a concern.
Monday, July 15, 2013
Friday, July 5, 2013
Monday, June 17, 2013
Monday, April 8, 2013
Thursday, March 28, 2013
1/180 ???
At the bottom of the page, it says: "1/180"... 180 pages of dense legalese. Aside from the sheer humor value, does this constitute an unenforceable shrink-wrap agreement?
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Rereading "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" by Cordwainer Smith.
Rereading "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" by Cordwainer Smith.
Smith didn't write many stories, but they linger in my mind far more than most. The first one I remember reading was "No, No, Not Rogov!" -- I remembered the story intensely, but forgot where I read it, or who the author was. "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons" was the same -- the story burned itself into my memory, but I couldn't remember where I read it or who it was by.
A couple of years ago the mystery resolved: there's a book that reprints his complete short works. Some of the titles have an amazing poetic liveness: "The Dead Lady of Clown Town", "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard", "Scanners Live in Vain", "The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-At-All".
http://www.amazon.com/Rediscovery-Man-Complete-Science-Cordwainer/dp/0915368560/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362700388&sr=1-1&keywords=cordwainer+smith
Smith didn't write many stories, but they linger in my mind far more than most. The first one I remember reading was "No, No, Not Rogov!" -- I remembered the story intensely, but forgot where I read it, or who the author was. "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons" was the same -- the story burned itself into my memory, but I couldn't remember where I read it or who it was by.
A couple of years ago the mystery resolved: there's a book that reprints his complete short works. Some of the titles have an amazing poetic liveness: "The Dead Lady of Clown Town", "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard", "Scanners Live in Vain", "The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-At-All".
http://www.amazon.com/Rediscovery-Man-Complete-Science-Cordwainer/dp/0915368560/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362700388&sr=1-1&keywords=cordwainer+smith
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