For no reason, here's the Tayto mascott
Lately, I haven’t had so much time to put together regularish posts, but that doesn’t mean I’m not reading or shaking my fist at current events somewhere. Plenty of other bloggers and writers do this, so why should I miss out on the chance? You want to know what I’m reading and what I think about everything, right?
The Wikileaks story will probably grow further as the week drags on. I wrote a piece for Chicagoist, the other site I write for, which you can read right here. I was going to attempt a more detailed follow up here, but thanks to my editor’s great work, I was able to fit almost everything in. Essentially, my basic points are simply that the data dump can’t be both innocuous information and terribly damaging, that we need to have a serious conversation about when this war is going to end and that if we’re a free, democratic, society, how is it that we’re so secretive? I also highly recommend reading each link in full. The story is nebulous and ever changing, but one of the most significant of the year.
Much like the difference between Obama’s vacation time and Bush’s, it turns out that despite conservative whining and outright falsehoods, the Secret Service is protecting “significantly fewer” figures in the Obama administration.
Does the internet mean the “End of Forgetting?” The New York times had a great piece a few days ago. I’m still slogging through it, but it’s a burning cultural question we should start considering.
I’ve written on this before, but Kevin Drum at Mother Jones makes more salient points regarding the privacy of our credit scores. “I am proposing that we write a regulation prohibiting credit reporting agencies from releasing credit information to anyone not directly involved in extending credit.” For folks like me and millions of other Americans, our nasty credit scores will probably follow us beyond the grave. Debt is a prison, both virtual and in the flesh.
Post by Aaron Cynic
Recession is when a neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours.