Dear LazyWeb: I am looking for large-format images that convey the idea of social experimentation or deep personal exploration. (No animated GIFs, James Tuttle. Also, SFW please!) Help?

This is a damn shame. (I wish we all could have gotten a bit more of that “government shutdown” we keep hearing about. But narcs never have budget problems, because the idiotic and destructive War on Drugs trumps everything else.) http://gizmodo.com/feds-seize-silk-road-everybodys-favorite-illegal-drug-1440172693 If there is any hope here, it’s to remember that Silk Road was just a start, and although it made heavy use of decentralized technologies (Tor, Bitcoin), it was ultimately a centralized web service. A stationary target which, eventually, the narcs were going to find. It looks like it will go down as the Napster of online black markets. Now, the question is, what’s going to become the BitTorrent?

Seriously, please shut down more government. Start here.

Good. “More cops” means more violence and harassment on Las Vegas streets. It’s bad enough to hike the sales tax, which disproportionately burdens the poorest and most marginalized with paying for local government. Here the proposal was not only to inflict higher costs of living on the poor, but to do so specifically so that they could be forced to pay for more of the police who abuse and oppress them. The Clark County Commission ought to be ashamed that they even considered such a measure, and there is nothing but good in the fact that they failed to pass it.

“‘War’ with air quotes isn’t about achieving an objective. It’s about maintaining credibility!” http://www.thenation.com/blog/176091/when-war-not-war

is planning a research trip to the Labadie archive. Will be hitting the stacks in just over a week.

From ACIJ: “On Oct 5th, we will march in Birmingham for immigration reform. We need your help to give a great image and are asking you to be a volunteer. We have teams for Security, Cleanup, Tabling, Water Station, and T-Shirt & Bracelet sales. To volunteer please contact Evelyn at 256-577-8919. Thanks!”

Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) and Students for a Stateless Society’s websites were attacked earlier this week by a Belgian racist and a copy-fascist lawyer he enlisted to try to censor our documentation of public racist statements made by him and his friends. We fought back by doubling-down on our free speech, documenting the story that they were trying to censor and also the abusive legal tactics that they were using to attack us. And we just won. The story’s here. At c4ss.org, because we are back on the air. http://c4ss.org/content/21587

Any kind of detail on matters like detailed grammar and intonation is really necessarily pretty speculative. Still, this is awesome.