Quick Hitts

We stopped SOPA/PIPA, a bill that would have broken the internet, with a huge effort that included shutting down major sites and minor ones (like this one), creating an uproar that congress was afraid to ignore. But we know it was only a temporary victory and some new version if it will be back with […]

Amateur evil villains construct elaborate plans that require dozens of complex capers to work flawlessly. The best evil villains are far more subtle. They reach their goal with one single action, one domino they flick, almost casually, before sitting back to watch events inevitably tumble into completing their master plan. Perhaps it was just luck, […]

Many years ago some of us were sounding the warning that once the Nicotine Nazis mastered their blueprint for vilifying and marginalizing smokers, other nannies, with different agendas, would use that blueprint to force compliance with their cause. Those predictions have come true, and now the country’s foremost nanny movement wants to control our diets. […]

I built my first website in the mid 90’s. It was a single page containing a list of local dial-up BBSs, with mine, Electric Avenue, at the top of the list. (Ponder the awesomeness of that business model – advertising a dial-up BBS on a web page. Ugh.) Before building it I sought out the […]

After being more or less ignored by the masses during his last two presidential bids, Ron Paul is now getting some real traction, which scares a lot of people. He scares lefties, who love Big Huge Government. He scares the right-wingers who, despite their claims to the contrary, also love Big Huge Government. He scares […]

Our world is full pseudo-intellectuals, like Chomsky and Krugman and Gingrich and that loud-talker two tables over at lunch yesterday who just would not shut the fuck up. Real intellectuals, the people who force us to challenge not just our assumptions but our most deeply held beliefs, who make us think in ways we’ve never […]

I used to like cops. I thought there were just a few bad ones, and that most of them performed a vital service. Some of that opinion was the result of conversations with them on GEnie, a pre-internet dial up service similar to CompuServe and Prodigy. People paid six bucks an hour for a 1200 […]