There was an old McDonalds commercial that always annoyed me, as a vegetarian. We see Ronald McDonald in a grove of hamburger trees, plucking a Big Mac from a nearby branch. It bugged me because it concealed the ugly reality of how that little meatpuck found its way into those (at the time) styrofoam containers. […]

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Warning: Matrix Reloaded spoilers in post below. The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation. —Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle Even as reviews of the second much-anticipated film in the […]

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…that The Fifty-Minute Hour, by my one-time debate partner Amy, is a phenomenal blog. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blather…

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Is distributed supercomputing overhyped? So says Shirky.

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You know, I’ve always had a vague suspicion that a large part of the appeal of antiglobo protest was the social scene, not to mention the opportunity to flirt with attractive young people in revealing hand-stitched Guatemalan attire. Now, there’s proof. Update: Wow, am I a dunce… I missed the best part. Commenter Andy points […]

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Jesse Walker busts out with an insightful post on media consolidation and spectrum reform.

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Andrew Sullivan has a puzzling line today about “those too embarrassed to admit that they were wrong about the war on terror, wrong about the war in Afghanistan, wrong about the war against Saddam.” Now, I never had a problem with the “war on terror” in principle, and I was basically OK with the Afghanistan […]

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Antle has written a thoughtful response to the post on the conservative/libertarian coalition below. There’s little to disagree with there—in part because I seem to have misread him in places the last time around—though I did note the following: Is the tension between libertarians and conservative really worse than it was during the height of […]

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I’m having a running debate with some lefty friends at Jakeneck on the 2001 crisis in Argentina.

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TAPped points to a WaPo column citing a conversation between Tom DeLay and steakhouse manager Tom Khandker, who delay was attempting to bully into letting him smoke in the restaurant: Khandker: “I’m sorry, sir, but this is a federal building, and it’s against the law of the federal government.” DeLay: “I am the federal government.” […]

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