Ramblings & ephemera
This quotation is directly about politics, but it’s about anyone – or even anything – we emotionally attach ourselves to.
From Glenn Greenwald’s “My friend the president” (Salon: 8 December 2009):
Those who venerated Bush because he was a morally upright and strong evangelical-warrior-family man and revere Palin as a common-sense Christian hockey mom are similar [...]
Posted on December 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From David Foster Wallace’s “Introduction” (The Best American Essays 2007):
Here is an overt premise. There is just no way that 2004’s reelection could have taken place—not to mention extraordinary renditions, legalized torture, FISA-flouting, or the
passage of the Military Commissions Act—if we had been paying attention and handling information in a competent grown-up way. ‘We’ meaning [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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Read this article about Paul Krassner’s experiences with the Manson Family & note the emphasis I’ve added – is this not the greatest sentence out of nowhere you’ve ever seen? How in the world did that ever seem like a good idea?
From Paul Krassner’s “My Acid Trip with Squeaky Fromme” (The Huffington Post: [...]
Posted on August 10th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, on writing, politics, true stories, weird | No Comments »
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From Robert Darnton’s “Google & the Future of Books” (The New York Review of Books: 12 February 2009):
As the Enlightenment faded in the early nineteenth century, professionalization set in. You can follow the process by comparing the Encyclopédie of Diderot, which organized knowledge into an organic whole dominated by the faculty of reason, [...]
Posted on July 15th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Timothy Noah’s “Why No More 9/11s?: An interactive inquiry about why America hasn’t been attacked again” (Slate: 5 March 2009):
… I spent the Obama transition asking various terrorism experts why the dire predictions of a 9/11 sequel proved untrue and reviewing the literature on this question. The answers boiled down to eight [...]
Posted on July 15th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics, religion, security | No Comments »
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From Adam St. Patrick’s “Chop Chop Square: Inside Saudi Arabia’s brutal justice system” (The Walrus: May 2009):
This is Saudi Arabia, one of the last places on earth where capital punishment is a public spectacle. Decapitation awaits murderers, but the death penalty also applies to many other crimes, such as armed robbery, rape, adultery, [...]
Posted on July 15th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: law, politics, religion, security | No Comments »
photo credit: sleepymyf
2005
From Brian Krebs’ “Leaving Las Vegas: So Long DefCon and Blackhat” (The Washington Post: 1 August 2005):
DefCon 13 also was notable for being the location where two new world records were set — both involved shooting certain electronic signals unprecedented distances. Los Angeles-based Flexilis set the world record for transmitting data to [...]
Posted on July 7th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Steven Berlin Johnson’s “Old Growth Media And The Future Of News” (StevenBerlinJohnson.com: 14 March 2009):
The first Presidential election that I followed in an obsessive way was the 1992 election that Clinton won. I was as compulsive a news junkie about that campaign as I was about the Mac in college: every day [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” (Gourmet: ):
As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Roger Ebert’s “The O’Reilly Procedure” (Roger Ebert’s Journal: 14 June 2009):
The seven propaganda devices include:
Name calling — giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence;
Glittering generalities — the opposite of name calling;
Card stacking — the selective use of facts and half-truths;
Bandwagon — appeals to the desire, common [...]
Posted on June 16th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, language & literature, on writing, politics | No Comments »
From Rob Cottingham’s “From blocking to botnet: Censorship isn’t the only problem with China’s new Internet blocking software” (Social Signal: 10 June 2009):
Any blocking software needs to update itself from time to time: at the very least to freshen its database of forbidden content, and more than likely to fix bugs, add features and [...]
Posted on June 13th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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photo credit: 708718
From Annie Karni’s “Gabbing Taxi Drivers Talking on ‘Party Lines’” (The New York Sun: 11 January 2007):
It’s not just wives at home or relatives overseas that keep taxi drivers tied up on their cellular phones during work shifts. Many cabbies say that when they are chatting on duty, it’s often with their [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Milton Glaser’s “Ten Things I Have Learned” (Milton Glaser: 22 November 2001):
… the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have [...]
Posted on May 22nd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Brian Prince’s “How Terrorism Touches the ‘Cloud’ at RSA” (eWeek: 23 April 2009):
When it comes to the war on terrorism, not all battles, intelligence gathering and recruitment happen in the street. Some of it occurs in the more elusive world of the Internet, where supporters of terrorist networks build social networking sites to recruit and [...]
Posted on May 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, politics, security, social software, tech in changing society | No Comments »
photo credit: bobster855
From Andrew Sullivan’s “Who Will “Sister Souljah” Them?” (The Daily Dish: 5 May 2009):
… the GOP is poison to me and many others. Why?
Their abandonment of limited government, their absurd spending under Bush, their contempt for civil liberties, their rigid mindset, their hostility to others, their worship of the executive branch, their [...]
Posted on May 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Jeff Sigmund’s “Newspaper Web Site Audience Increases More Than Ten Percent In First Quarter To 73.3 Million Visitors” (Newspaper Association of America: 23 April 2009):
Newspaper Web sites attracted more than 73.3 million monthly unique visitors on average (43.6 percent of all Internet users) in the first quarter of 2009, a record number that reflects [...]
Posted on April 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Liz Laffan’s “GPLv2 vs GPLv3: The two seminal open source licenses, their roots, consequences and repercussions” (VisionMobile: September 2007):
Cumulatively patents have been doubling practically every year since 1990. Patents are now probably the most contentious issue in software-related intellectual property rights.
…
However we should also be aware that software written from scratch is as likely [...]
Posted on April 25th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From David Foster Wallace’s “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub: Seven Days In The Life Of The Late, Great John McCain” (Rolling Stone: 13 April 2000):
The weird thing is that the word “leader” itself is cliché and boring, but when you come across somebody who actually is a real leader, that person isn’t cliché [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, language & literature, politics | No Comments »
From David G. Post’s “Jefferson’s Moose” (Remarks presented at the Stanford Law School Conference on Privacy in Cyberspace: 7 February 2000):
In 1787, Jefferson, then the American Minister to France, had the “complete skeleton, skin & horns of the Moose” shipped to him in Paris and mounted in the lobby of his hotel. One can only [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics, science | No Comments »
From Steven Weinberg’s “Without God” (The New York Review of Books: 25 September 2008):
It has often been noted that the greatest horrors of the twentieth century were perpetrated by regimes – Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China – that while rejecting some or all of the teachings of religion, copied characteristics of religion at its [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics, religion | No Comments »
