Men in Uniform (cont’d)

Men in Uniform (cont’d)

8× copies of Bourne’s The State, hot off the presses. Next up: backfilling inventory of Spooner’s Letters to Bayard. http://distro.libertarianleft.org/for/anarchist-classics-series/the-state/

To-day @ Rad Geek People’s Daily [radgeek.com]: Progressive Politics: Send in all your private phone records to me, Al Franken, Washington, DC. http://radgeek.com/gt/2013/06/11/progressive-politics-al-franken/

Of course it is. And (as Anthony Gregory points out), it’s real American food, too. The only reason that it seems like it couldn’t be both is the idiotic notion that cultures can be, and ought to be, subjected to the same nationalized monopolies on allegiance and social support that people’s political identities are currently subjected to. Along with the snobbish and exoticizing notion that the food eaten by people on the periphery or in the diaspora somehow counts as less really, authentically, or properly part of the “national” cuisine as the food eaten by people in the capital or the interior.

Portuguese courses: probably booked? (If everything looks good and all goes as planned, there’s a school within a 5 minute walk down Rua do Alecrim from the apartment where we’ll be staying.)

From Shawn P. Wilbur: “While looking for something else, I ran across this archived copy of “Voices from the Net” 2.1, an e-zine that I co-edited in 1993-94. I’m not sure how long it’s been since I looked at this issue, but there’s fun stuff there, including a short Q&A with William Gibson, and a piece by Carl Holmberg, which I had honestly forgotten about entirely and is very nice to rediscover….” O.K., the zine is a lot of fun just on its own. But seeing a gopher:// prefix URL seriously just made my day.

http://reason.com/blog/2013/06/11/the-demonization-machine-cranks-up-again (*) According to Jeffrey Toobin, Legal Correspondent for the New Yorker, “The question, of course, is whether the government can function when all of its employees (and contractors) can take it upon themselves to sabotage the programs they don’t like. That’s what Snowden has done.” And of course the answer is that it cannot function that way. Which is exactly why Edward Snowden is a big damn hero. What in the world made you think that the smooth functioning of a totalitarian surveillance state is something that anybody ought to be assuring? (* t/w Ari Fleischer. With the sole exception of Donald Rumsfeld, there is nobody in the world who I have been less pleased to see re-enter public discourse than “Ari Fleischer, CNN contributor, former White House press secretary under George W. Bush.”)

is asking around about Portuguese language lessons (preferably near the Baixa or Chiado) to take during the upcoming trip to Lisbon.

To-day @ Rad Geek People’s Daily [radgeek.com]: Your Tuesday morning Spontaneous Order http://radgeek.com/gt/2013/06/11/your-tuesday-morning-spontaneous-order/ Fish are pretty awesome. (So’s technological civilization.)