Month: March 2006

ACLU Releases First Concrete Evidence of FBI Spying Based Solely on Groups’ Anti-War Views

American Civil Liberties Union : ACLU Releases First Concrete Evidence of FBI Spying Based Solely on Groups’ Anti-War Views

Two documents released today reveal that the FBI investigated gatherings of the Thomas Merton Center for Peace & Justice just because the organization opposed the war in Iraq. Although previously disclosed documents show that the FBI is retaining files on anti-war groups, these documents are the first to show conclusively that the rationale for FBI targeting is the group’s opposition to the war.“It makes no sense that the FBI would be spying on peace activists handing out flyers,” said Jim Kleissler, Executive Director of the Thomas Merton Center for Peace & Justice. “Our members were simply offering leaflets to passersby, legally and peacefully, and now they’re being investigated by a counter–terrorism unit. Something is seriously wrong in how our government determines who and what constitutes terrorism when peace activists find themselves targeted.”

And the departed shade of J. Edgar Hoover smiles.

Berry vs. The Geekosphere

“The most radical influence of reductive science has been the virtually universal adoption of the idea that the world, its creatures, and all the parts of its creatures are machines—that is, that there is no difference between creature and artifice, birth and manufacture, thought and computation. Our language, wherever it is used, is now almost invariably conditioned by the assumption that fleshly bodies are machines full of mechanisms, fully compatible with the mechanisms of medicine, industry, and commerce; and that minds are computers fully compatible with electronic technology.”This may have begun as a metaphor, but in the language as it is used (and as it affects industrial practice) it has evolved from metaphor through equation to identification. And this usage institutionalizes the human wish, or the sin of wishing, that life might be, or might be made to be, predictable.”

— Wendell Berry

Mind Performance Hacks provides real-life tips and tools for overclocking your brain and becoming a better thinker. In the increasingly frenetic pace of today’s information economy, managing your life requires hacking your brain. With this book, you’ll cut through the clutter and tune up your brain intentionally, safely, and productively.

— The O’Reilly & Associates book catalog.

Overcompensating: Blog Song

Overcompensating: Actual Things That Happen to Jeffrey Rowland: Blog Song

With the new iBlogoscope Pro you can wriggle blindly through the moist, decaying flesh of free information just like the maggot you are. Three hundred and sixty degrees of things you never really needed to know about.Just kidding, Blogosphere, you know I consider you mildly digestible on occasion. But I’m calling you the Blogodrome from now on. You know it’s cooler!

The comic itself made me laugh.  I’m hooked on Jeffrey Rowland’s stuff.

Giant Zit Fashion

Wired News:

In years that followed, subdermal implants became popular in the community of extreme body modification. The process creates a raised area on the skin in a shape of the artist’s choosing. The effect is dramatic: Implants can be most any form you can think of, from Star Trek ridges and small horns, to little stars and hearts sprayed across the chest. Many people with body modifications have combined their implants with tattoos to create often beautiful or terrible effects.

In my day, we called little sub-dermal nodules “zits” or “boils” or even “cysts.”  Now you can get custom-made boils in designer shapes as a fashion statement.

Is my bed in the retirement home ready yet?  I was fine with the tattoos and the piercings, but man.  I just don’t get this stuff.  I’m assuming trepanation-as-fashion-statement will be next.

This is via bOingBOing, of course. BTW, if you’re wondering what BoingBong’s all about, they revealed the secret this week: “We’re all about celebrating the weird, about wooing the muse of the odd. About being in touch with your inner outsider.”

I dunno, for my money the muse of the odd is Fortean Times.