Prosthetic Conscience

I promise to write something that isn’t just a link collection one of these days.

• Welcome to Roseanne World
  

  Roseanne Barr’s blog is full of much more high-weirdness than you would expect.

• Beat the Press Archive | The American Prospect
  

  Interesting debate in comments about whether real wages are actually rising during the current crash.

• Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Perfume Oils: Welcome to the Lab
  

  Extremely fascinating perfumery. Many scents are olfactory interpretations of characters, scenes, or concepts from literature and philosophy.

• The Science of Peace
  

  A feature-length documentary on what peace is, and why we have trouble realizing it, with reference to new scientific studies; hosted by LeVar Burton. Unfortunately, some of it dips into pseudoscience (like morphogenetic field theory and “noetic science”), but any attempt at dealing with this is better than no attempt.

• partiwm – a tabbed/tiled window manager for modern desktops
  

  This seems like a pretty nice idea – to do the kind of things that hacker-friendly environments like ion or stumpwm do, but look good doing it.

• Mekabu: seaweed for cancer prevention
  

Again, some of this has been piling up.

• Gaza medics describe horror of strike which killed 70 - Telegraph
  

  100 members of an extended family were ordered into a building by the IDF, which then shelled the building.

• ISS - Another TVA coal waste spill underscores need for federal action
  

  Coal waste: much worse than anyone previously thought, apparently.

• ZNet - Tel Aviv Reflections
  Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir on the nature of the assault in Gaza.
• Micro Persuasion: Why Text Remains King of the Web
  
• LENIN’S TOMB: Resisting the recession
  

  Pretty UK-centric, but some features are relevant to the US.

• Let’s Get Get Those Freight Trucks Off the Road and Put America Back on Tracks | Environment | AlterNet
  

  Back to the future.

• Nancy Kanwisher: Reigniting Violence: How Do Ceasefires End?
  

  Stats show Israel is more likely than Hamas to resume violence after a period of relative peace.

• 2009-2010 Bill 56: Profanity - South Carolina Legislature Online
  

  SC Legislature seeks to outlaw profanity in verbal or written form in any public place or forum.

  > “Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.” - Bertrand Russell

• Face Facts: Outsourcing Sucks
  
• Homage to Icarus » Blog Archive » Ubuntu Ruined My Life
  

  GNU systems are already easier to use and more capable than mainstream systems. But ISPs, universities, and employers undermine that advantage by imposing arbitrary requirements on how you must do things rather than practical requirements on what you must do.

• Redirect linux console beep to the sound card « Autopragmatic
  

  Nice to see someone is using something I’ve written.

• The Trouble with Those %u201CShovel-Ready%u201D Projects
  

• 1 step forward, 2 steps back « PhD in Parenting Blog
  

  Facebook has now deleted someone’s account for posting their breastfeeding pictures.

• Michelle%u2019s Blog » Blog Archive » Facebook%u2019s saga against Breastfeeding photos%u2026
  
• ISS - Texas activist involved in New Orleans projects admits to being an FBI informant
  
• Brandon Darby : Proud FBI Informant and Snitch
  
• a brief history of guile – wingolog
  

  Very interesting article on the goals behind the guile programming language, why it hasn’t really succeeded, and what needs to happen to make it succeed.

• Good post on making baby food
  
• Schneier on Security: Allocating Resources: Financial Fraud vs. Terrorism
  
• fíam » Using a metaclass for registering template tags
  
• “Top 5 Lies About Israel%u2019s Assault on Gaza” by Jeremy R. Hammond
  
• LENIN’S TOMB: A lie you weren’t supposed to believe
  

• Johann Hari: You are being lied to about pirates - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent
  
• Making Whole Wheat Bread, Part One | The New Homemaker
  
• THE REVOLUTIONARY PLEASURE OF THINKING FOR YOURSELF
  
• Don’t like speed cameras? Use them to punk your enemies
  
• Infoshop News - On the Israeli war in Gaza
  

  Anarchist communist analysis from Syria.

• Does Last Child In The Woods say anything new?

  I’m currently reading this book, and while I strongly agree with many of its points, and value my childhood in the woods very much, I also agree with this review, and don’t care for some of the knee-jerk luddism of the book’s author.

• Fighting the Greedy Defense Lobbyists: Our Our Schools vs. Their Worthless Weaponry
  
• A jaded left-wing view of Barack Obama, circa 2000? | Straight.com
  
• Camltastic!: Destroying old hard drives
  
• Target: Freedom: Armed jack boots confiscate family’s personal food supply. Is this a prelude to government created depression, or even famine?
  
• LENIN’S TOMB: The intelligence
  

  An analysis of the strategy and propaganda of the Israeli massacre of civilians in Gaza.

Again, these are delayed a little bit.

• Joe Bageant: Obama’s election will keep liberals happy
  

  Tomas, a Bageant reader writes:

  > So now Obama parades his lineup of economic advisers and, in the immortal words of Gomer Pyle, “Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!” But only if you’ve not been paying attention all along. The only surprise is how easily the democrats managed to get people all jacked up about pissing in their own beds. I am hoping that Thomas Frank will explain all this in his next book.

  Ayup.

• denialism blog : Cancer 101
  

  The basics of what cancer is, how it works, and how it is treated. If you understand just this much, you’ll never be fooled by quacks pushing woo-woo cancer “treatments”.

• Cruella-blog: Dear Santa
  

  No anti-wrinkle cream for Christmas. Plus, the seven signs of aging. I have one (knows the words to ABBA songs).

• Workers - 1, Wal-Mart - 0: Employees Win Right to Unionize | PEEK | AlterNet
  
• Cooperation, Not Obedience
  

  An article on the roles of expertise and authority.

• Aegisub: If programming languages were religions…
  

  According to this, I am a Humanist/Zen Buddhist, forced to work in a Fundamentalist Christian environment. Which is disturbingly close to the truth.

• from Vim to Emacs - part 1
  

  Debian’s vim package maintainer and author of popular vim extensions switches to emacs.

• What Does Vilsack’s Appointment Mean for the Future of Organic Food and Public Lands? | Environment | AlterNet
  

Again, some of these have been piling up for a while.

• Rally Comrades
  

  Newspaper of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America.

• Joho the Blog » Philosophical problems with folksonomies
  
• Note to Obama: The Brightest Advisors Are Not Always the Best | Election 2008 | AlterNet
  

  There is a liberal cult of competence that leads liberals to often ignore the fact that being competent in the execution of bad policy is not a good thing.

• IWW-affiliated truckers to strike | libcom.org
  
• Austenbook
  

  Pride and Prejudice as a Facebook news feed.

• Firefox Pirates Take Over Amazon | TorrentFreak
  

  Not sure how I feel about this. I approve of efforts to undermine the copyright-monopoly regime, but Amazon is one of the good guys here, since they sell digital media (well, music anyway) at a reasonable price with no DRM.

• ISS - Duke Energy CEO for Obama’s Energy Secretary?
  
• The Cafes » Java is Dead! Long Live Python!
  
• Python Is Not Java (dirtSimple.org)
  

  An oldie but a goodie.

• Bob Sutton: Strong Opinions, Weakly Held
  
• The Best and the Brightest Have Led America Off a Cliff | | AlterNet
  
• Steven Chu: Obama’s Remarkable Choice for Energy Secretary
  

  It’s hard to decide if the selection of Dr. Chu is more remarkable for who he is — a Nobel laureate physicist and experienced public-sector administrator — or for who is not. Unlike previous secretaries of energy, he is neither a politician, oil man, military officer, lawyer, nor utility executive. His corporate ties are not to major industrial polluters but to advanced technology corporations like AT&T (where he began his Nobel-winning research) and Silicon Valley innovator Nvidia (where he sits on the board of directors). Chu is a man for the moment, and will be a singular addition to Obama’s Cabinet.

• Blog of helios: Linux - Stop holding our kids back
  

  Not sure if the quoted article is legit or not. It seems too close to parody.

• Amateur Woodworker: Compact TV Cabinet
  
• TV-Cabinet - BluMonkey
  
• Putting Away Your Media Toys | Media Room | Living Spaces | This Old House - 1
  
• Building an Inexpensive Entertainment System | Media Room | Living Spaces | This Old House - 1
  
• Joe Bageant: The Sucker Bait Called Hope
  

  In the big picture though, consumerism was never the problem. Capitalism was. And it still is. Conumerism is merely the way workers are compensated for the general shittiness of their lives. It seems to have worked. Thus, my urge to get on the public address system at the NASCAR Talledaga run and scream: “You fat fuckers don’t need another corndog or that fifteenth beer that has made your belly so big you haven’t seen your dick in ten years.”

  But as historian Eugene McCarrher points out, simply telling people that they’re too consumeristic, too materialistic, doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because it gives people the impression that the material and the spiritual are antithetical. Yet the natural material world is the only sacramental thing that exists (minus the corndogs).

• Informed Comment: Pakistani Reaganism Must End: The New Government must take on the Lashkar
  

  A long story, but basically the Mumbai attack traces back to the Reagan administration’s pressure on Pakistan to arm and train right-wing Islamic paramilitary death-squads.

• Occasional Superheroine: If Superman and Wonder Woman Were Real
  
• The Early Days of a Better Nation: All your firewall are belong to us
  

  A short talk on IT security by one of my favourite socialist Scottish science fiction writers.

• S.C. tax cuts get blame for budget woes - Local / Metro - The State
  

  It’s not the tax cuts so much as excessive reliance on sales taxes relative to the income tax. The biggest cut was one I approve of – eliminating sales taxes on groceries, and another was the elimination of the lowest income tax bracket. Both are good things, but they weren’t offset by increases in income taxes (especially income tax top rates).

• 5seven5: a haiku community
  
• Public timeline - Identi.ca
  
• Technomancy: you don’t want tabs.
  
• Free Productivity Planners | Productive Flourishing
  

• End of the Road: Is the Auto Industry Dead? | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet
  

  The automotive industry is an obsolete relic of the twen-cen, and the UAW management union is harming the labour movement and their fellow workers by trying to keep it alive.

• David Graeber, “Hope in Common” | Interactivist Info Exchange
  

  The author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology explains why we are all – sometimes – communists, and the alternative to rebuilding our shattered capitalism.

• Mad Science: A Step-By-Step Guide to Resurrecting the Woolly Mammoth
  
• An activist organization helps place squatters in big empty homes in Miami
  
• Peeling The Apple: In Which I Try To Explain Twilight
  
• Worldchanging: The Last Viridian Note
  Bruce Sterling on our changing relationship to our stuff. Most of this is good advice, assuming a positive future (i.e., a positive outcome to the current transition). But I’m afraid it’s a little early to assume that; we may be headed for big-C Collapse. I’ve got one foot in the Singularity and one foot in the Die-Off, and until I know which way we’re going, I’m clinging to my decent-but-not-marvellous twen-cen tools and my bug-out-bags.
• Cultural theories of risk and the rise of emergence systems | eaves.ca
  

  Why:

  1. Egalitarianism is clearly the right thing (compared to the alternatives of fatalism, hierarchism, and individualism).
  2. Egalitarian movements in the past have nevertheless sucked more than the alternatives.
  3. We are in a position today to produce egalitarian movements that do not suck.
  4. Those egalitarian systems would be better described as “emergent”.
• Past and Future
  

  Obama’s cabinet appointments are mainly backward-looking: they promise continuity not only with the first Clinton administration, but also to a significant degree with the Bush administration. This is, as the author of the article recognizes, the basic problem of liberalism: that it lacks any fundamental vision of a better society other than “pretty much what we have now, but better managed.”

• Governor Says He’ll Cut Statehouse Security Posts
  

  Break out the Rapture kits, I actually agree with Sanford on something.

• Schneier on Security: FBI Stoking Fear
  

Some of these have been stewing for a while.

• Austro-Athenian Empire » Cato Institute Publishes Leftist Screed!
  
• Petition against Larry Summers as Obama’s Treasury Secretary
  Go sign this.
• FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right: Prop 8 Myths
  

  I’ve been guilty of spreading the meme that new black and Latin@ voters were a significant part of the reason for Prop. 8’s passage. But it turns out that the main reason it passed is the aging of California’s population; new voters voted primarily against Prop 8.

• Bursting the proprietary-software bubble - at ZDNet.co.uk
  
• The Yes Men produce a fake version of the New York Times
  The Yes Men are one of the top satire/prank groups in the world today. The fake NYT is maybe a little predictable, but extremely well executed.
• The Oil Drum | A Resilient Suburbia? 2: Cost of Commuting
  The most interesting bit here is that the fixed costs of commuting (i.e., owning and maintaining a car, and parking) are more significant than the price of gasoline. If your family drives two 20-mpg cars every day, you would save more money by just ditching one of them than by replacing them with two 40-mpg cars. And the same goes for replacing your two 30-mpg cars with two 60-mpg cars.
• Against Fake Libertarian Clarity
  Self-styled libertarians tend to define ‘coercion’ in an artificially narrow sense, leading them to consider many types of coercive acts and relationships to be free.
• Philosophy, et cetera: Initiating Force
  
• Philosophy, et cetera: Property is Unnatural!
  
• The %u201CConservative%u201D Moral Sentiments: Do We Need Them?
  
• Obsidian Wings: Trusting Obama
  

  Trust, but verify?

• Facing South: Energy Watch: Ruling could disrupt plans for new coal plants nationwide
  
• News Analysis - Post-Guantánamo - A New Detention Law? - NYTimes.com
  

  What the hell is this fuckwittery? The incoming Obama administration is worried that they might have to release some prisoners when they close Guantanamo because they’re innocent?

• Vote Malik Rahim
  
• Humanitarian Imperialism: The New Doctrine of Imperial Right - Monthly Review
  

  An article by Noam Chomsky.

• A visual guide to the financial crisis
  
• Who Is IOZ?: More Notes on Libertarian Dickheads
  
• How to Run a Con | Psychology Today Blogs
  

  THOMAS (The Human Oxytocin Mediated Attachment System):

  The key to a con is not that you trust the conman, but that he shows he trusts you. Conmen ply their trade by appearing fragile or needing help, by seeming vulnerable. Because of THOMAS, the human brain makes us feel good when we help others–this is the basis for attachment to family and friends and cooperation with strangers. “I need your help” is a potent stimulus for action.

  Via Schneier on Security

• The Oil Drum | A Resilient Suburbia? 1: Sunk Cost & Credit Markets
  
• It’s More Dangerous NOT To Ride a Bike : TreeHugger
  
• Kerry Howley » Blog Archive » Libertarian Feminism versus Monarchist Anarchism
  
• Kerry Howley » Blog Archive » Feminism and Libertarianism Again
  

Some of these have been piling up for a while.

• Diebold faces GPL infringement lawsuit over voting machines
  

  It’s not surprising – if a company lacks a culture of ethics, it’s not going to be unethical in only one facet of its business.

• Obama’s Secret Weapon: Geeks. Lots of Them | Linux Journal
  

  Not surprisingly, McCain used Microsoft.

• Millions of Linux Users, they can’t all be experts. « dthomasdigital
  

  My impression is that a lot of these new users are people who are not technology professionals or even hobbyists like the old generation of Linux users, but are experienced, savvy computer users. People who are used to doing a lot of things on the web and who know that the correct response when you’re having a problem with a program is to google to see if anyone else is having it, too.

• Money Oriented Programmers
  

  Thank goddess I’m not one. I don’t get to program as much for my own ends as I’d like to anymore, but at least I still have a fundamental love for what I do.

• Osaka and the Yellow Sign (Shoujo-Ai Archive Azumanga Daioh Fanfiction)
  

  A bizarre story in which Osaka of Azumanga Daioh is chosen by the Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign as the new Cassilda…

• Ghosts of Clinton’s Past – In These Times
  

  Why is Obama recycling right-wing Clinton administration advisors for his cabinet?

• Open Source India: The practical problem with software patents
  
• Does the Human Mind Have Potential “Super Powers”? -A Galaxy Classic
  Temple Grandin discusses both the neurological and evolutionary bases of these in her books, as well as what it’s like to experience the world in this way.
• 20 tasks now that the election is over – hEyOkA mAgAzInE
  
• Jannis Leidel - An autocomplete widget for django-tagging form fields
  

• 76-year-old arrested for the 73rd time - General News
  

  Not quite a stainless steel rat, but a slightly tarnished one, anyway.

• Groklaw - The Bilski Decision Is In: Buh-Bye {Most} Business Methods Patents - As text & updated 4Xs
  
• New Contest: Can You Out-Lame the TSA? - Jeffrey Goldberg
  
• Bang! Bang! You’re Dead! by Jenny Knuth
  
• One Good Thing – a letter to Alex and Chris 12 years in the future
  

  A mother writes to her sons about what kind of man she wants them to grow up to be, with helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson as an example.

• Rad Geek People— Daily 2008-10-29 — How To Talk So The Government Can’t Listen. Part 1: how to encrypt your e-mail in Gmail with GPG (for use with Gmail or other web mail interfaces on Firefox in Windows)
  
• Time Management for Anarchists
  
• Quoted-Printable: Scribbish
  

  A standardized stylesheet and markup set for blogs. I’m not going to use it, but I may take some ideas from it.

• In a Blog’s Stead - February 2004
  Natural rights vs. egoism.
• Columbia Closings
  
• gregdek: Why Seneca Matters