Is Operation Payback “the first great cyber war” or just a “major shitstorm?” Are the mounting cyberattacks in support of Wikileaks something like the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s? Remember Mario Savio? Remember his prescient speech on the UC Berkeley campus in 1964? There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes […]

Here’s one way the print version of a daily newspaper beats the online version. Paul Krugman’s NYT column this morning, Freezing Out Hope, begins: After the Democratic “shellacking” in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he […]

Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks.‬ The U.S. government doesn’t think so, of course. It is frantic about today’s “expected release of up to three million confidential diplomatic communiques by the Wikileaks website.” (Scroll down for continuing updates.) Update: “US embassy cables: browse the database” — via The Guardian WASHINGTON — A cache of […]

It’s the week of Thanksgiving, after all: Words of Gratitude. And here’s more Burroughs … on Jesus … the A-Bomb … the Titanic … Doctor Benway … you get the idea. It’s a 1989 reading. He was doing perfected shtick by then. The automatic audience adulation, which was unavoidable under the circumstances — he was […]

This report from Athens under the Greek military junta 42 years ago turned up in a batch of old letters and postcards that a friend found the other day in a forgotten file. “How I come to have it,” he writes, “is a mystery.” Well, mystery solved: He and I were doing VDRSVP at the […]

Kant was also born in 1724, a coincidence not lost on Editions Silverbridge, the French publisher of Birth of the Cunt. The video was recorded Nov. 5, 2010, at the fifth annual NY Art Book Fair, taking place this weekend at MoMA P.S. 1 in Queens, New York. On the soundtrack that’s Spike Wilner noodling […]

…and Matt Lauer is his enabler. “I really don’t care about perceptions at this point in time. … I’m a content man.”— George W. Bush Postscript: Nov. 7 — It’s worth mentioning Robert Fisk’s perceptions in this context. He writes almost daily, and his stuff is incomparable. These two recent columns are just two back-to-back […]

Gone. He was a real mensch. I had a short conversation with him in 2006 and asked him a few questions on the chance that he’d actually give me an answer. Which he did. This is what he said: Ted Sorensen’s Italics and Starry Rearview Mirror. (Crossposted at HuffPo) Postscript: Nov. 3 — And now […]

Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography – Language from Matthew Rogers on Vimeo. Thanks for the tip, Tom. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Via the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Thank you. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Here’s the launch video: And here’s their Web site. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

“The Unnatural Act Act,” by Norman O. Mustill [1974], is from the collectionof Knud Petersen. It appeared originally in a Copenhagen Fluxus show. More Mustill. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Never mind the solemn hyperbole of this “leaked memo,” which comes via MoveOn.org. It does tell the real story: The Cabal of Multinational Corporations is pleased to formally announce RepubliCorpTM, a new combined entity following our complete merger with the Republican Party. RepubliCorpTM combines the ethics-free campaigning savvy of the GOP with the limit-free spending […]

We are all BananaRepublicans. Obama has claimed the right to assassinate American citizens whom he suspects of “terrorism,” merely on the grounds of his own suspicion or that of the CIA, something Bush never claimed publicly.” — The World Can’t Wait Also, “Obama says that the government can detain you indefinitely, even if you have […]

May I add an annex to The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, which is now on in New York at The Museum of Modern Art? The MoMA show features works by lotsa biggies — Atget, Bellmer, Brancusi, Brassaï, Duchamp, Frank, Friedlander, Gaillard, Höch, Kertész, Man Ray, Nauman, and too many others to […]

Went to see the exhibition “Experimental Women in Flux” at the MoMA Library. There was much to like, although it’s a small exhibit. I got a kick out of this feminist blast: fluxus can be lots of fun when the boys let you on their boatsometimes they throw you off the boatyou have to be […]

When Barack Obama rebuffed calls for an independent truth commission, choosing not to investigate George W. Bush and his cronies as war criminals, he forfeited whatever moral authority he might have had as president. In his Aug. 31 Oval Office speech announcing “the end of the combat mission in Iraq” he even heaped praise on […]