Content warning: language, depictions of possible mental health breakdown(s). 2:49 AM. I get a request for pickup at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. It’s a little too early for it to be an airport run, though I’ve had at least one person…
The Singularity is Already Here
The Singularity is already here. It’s corporations, not computers. You’ve probably heard of the Singularity. It’s a hypothetical future event, dystopian in nature, wherein the need for human intervention in human affairs is swept aside by super-intelligent computers who self-teach,…
Haunted City
It’s Twelfth Night. Happy Twelfth Night, everybody! Here is my favorite song about Twelfth Night: It occurs to me that posting links to things isn’t really good enough for the long-term posterity of the web. Sometimes I review old posts…
Our Need for an Enemy: America’s Adversarial Obsession
“Down the corner by the hotdog stand I seen a man I said ‘Howdy friend, I guess it’s just us two’ He screamed a bit and away he flew Thought I was a Communist” -Bob Dylan, “Talking World War III…
What We Could (Should) Have Done for Aleppo
As a pacifist, one of the most frequent criticisms I face is that I am advocating “doing nothing” in the face of atrocities near and far. There are just bad people in the world, the argument goes, who will kill…
Expectations of American Power
I almost titled this “Donald Trump and the Expectations of American Power”. Just as you could title anything in the last decade “Harry Potter and X” and have it be an instant hit, so too does placing a “Donald Trump…
A Life Lived Out Loud: Remembering Jonathan Bernbaum (1982-2016)
On Saturday morning, I woke up late, as I usually do these days. I’d been out driving till about 3:00 AM, wrapping up Friday night much earlier than normal. I was feeling a little sick. That night, I had nightmares,…
We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
Look at that headline. Look at it! I know I was excited in my 6,000 word election recap to observe that the problems with our reported unemployment figure and its relationship to labor force participation data had become a mainstream…
A Radical Leftist in Donald Trump’s America
“I vote for the Democratic Party They want the UN to be strong… Once I was young and impulsive I wore every conceivable pin Even went to the socialist meetings Learned all the old union hymns But I’ve grown older…
All Politics is Personal: The Epic and Foreseeable Failure of Hillary Clinton
Disclaimer: I have deliberately waited a week to post this since the election because most of my friends and people I care about have spent the week grieving. If you are still grieving, if you are tender from the election…