Oh hello, someone just brought up Simon Baron Cohen’s experimental work again in order to try to bolster a point in debate. I can think of no conversation that is not made a little bit worse by the appearance.

To-day @ Rad Geek People’s Daily [radgeek.com]: We know other marketplaces.

Of course he doesn’t. He is a United States Senator; he is in favor of secret government because his job, and his career ambition, is to govern and to keep secrets. If a U.S. Senator ever had less sympathy for the U.S. government and its secrecy laws than he had for their victims, that would be the unusual fact in need of explanation. (This is, of course, why it is foolish to think that making people into Senators is ever going to be a means of achieving greater openness or freedom. By making them a Senator, you give them the strongest possible incentive to take exactly this stance.)

“The military coup that overthrew Mosaddeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government,” reads a previously excised section of an internal CIA history . . .” I predict that this will have exactly no effect at all on how anyone in mainstream political commentary talks about the motives, or the moral status, or the likely outcomes, of the U.S. government’s foreign policy. The very worst offenses of the U.S. government are largely openly-admitted matters of public record, and public-affairs commentary mostly proceeds on the assumption that there is nothing at all to say about that, except to wave it off with a quick segue of “Yes, yes, of course there were certain excesses; but . . . .”

O.K., so basically every caption I have seen that has been submitted to this “overly manly man” image macro ranges somewhere between mind-numbingly unfunny and hideously offensive and vile (including jokes about violence against women, etc.). This is tiresome; and it’s too bad, because it really is a pretty good photo for an image macro. Therefore, I’ll be trying to add a bit of variety; feel free to join. Let’s start with this. http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3vjmmc/

More zesty catch-up from the ALL Distro — chapbooks of Roy Childs’ remarkable “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism,” an off-print of a chapter from MARKETS NOT CAPITALISM.

“. . . There are more than 100 SWAT team raids every day in [the United States]. . . .” – Radley Balko http://www.salon.com/2013/07/13/radley_balko_once_a_town_gets_a_swat_team_you_want_to_use_it/

is getting caught up on backlogged work for ALL Distro. Part of which involves setting up an ALL Distro Facebook page. Expect some zesty catsup posts soon on the titles I’ve added over the summer.

To-day @ Rad Geek People’s Daily [radgeek.com]: Pigs as a Paradigm

To-day @ Rad Geek People’s Daily [radgeek.com]: We knew that the world would not be the same.