(very promising)

OK, drop EVERYthing and look at this. It was already brilliant work, but here we see that it's bloody AWESOME! Sydney Padua for Queen of Everything!

Incendiary stuff, in its quiet way: "…The proprietary library management system sector is a relatively insignificant player in the global IT market and therefore has very limited investment capital. However, much of this capital is squandered on customising their products for the benefit of librarians rather than their users…"

Juan Cole's admirable clarity: "In the cases both of Iraq and of Deepwater Horizon, oil men were trying to get a big reserves of petroleum that had earlier been out of their reach. Iraq’s 115 billion barrels of oil had been put off limits by sanctions pushed for in Congress by, among others, the Israel lobbies. The Deepwater Horizon lay deep under the Gulf of Mexico, under a mile of water and 2 further miles of the earth’s crust — the deepest oil well in history…"

(lovely presentation)

uh huh: "…a media strategy designed to bolster support for the war effort in the wake of a couple of weeks worth of adverse events and reporting…" (file under Why Am I Not Surprised?)

the bit that got ME: "…Ohio, where a group of developers wanted to open casinos. Led by Rock Ventures, the investment vehicle of Quicken Loans owner Dan Gilbert of Detroit, the group spent $47 million to draft, put on the ballot, and pass a constitutional amendment permitting casino gambling in Ohio. But this initiative did much, much more than that. It only permitted casinos on four specific properties — properties controlled by the referendum backers — and thus granted them exclusive rights to open casinos. It exempted their casinos from zoning or most other types of local control, authorized them to operate 24 hours a day, and specified a very low license fee of only $50 million per casino to the state. It also permitted them not only to run any game currently allowed by any surrounding state, but also any game those states might approve in the future. It's undoubtedly one of the most incredible constitutional amendments in the history of the United States…"

ok yeah it's BoingBoing and everybody's seen it, but this is magnificent

Bruce Sterling keeps his eyes peeled for you. His Envoi: "And now you have to envision a buzzing horde of lawless, unacknowledged, kill-at-will CIA Predators buzzing above all this. It’s not the Somme or anything, but don’t get too surprised at the weird shape of your life when this war comes home…"

(a wonderful series of London images, another labor of love)

Rick Aschmann's summary, with remarkable maps and links to audio samples, quite a few of them from YouTube videos. A labor of love, bottomlessly fascinating to explore

Daniel Heikalo plays the cittern I built