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Flakes Alive!
June 12, 2015
On not attending the Left Forum  A few weeks back in Manhattan, hundreds of socialists, communists, anarchists, and even few decent “small-d” democrats shuffled into the unlikely venue of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (ironically, best known as a ...

Daily Bafflements
June 12, 2015
• Today in Billionaires: inequality is terribly unfair, not least for billionaires. This surprisingly present sentiment was expressed most recently by Johann Rupert, the chairman of the company that owns Cartier. Speaking at the Financial ...

The American Way
June 11, 2015
Faisal bin Ali Jaber, a Yemeni man, filed suit against the United States government this week over the deaths of his brother-in-law and nephew in an unlawful 2012 drone strike. The suit is a tenacious follow up to an occasion in 2014 when Jaber was handed bundles of cash ...

Daily Bafflements
June 11, 2015
• Today in catering (badly) to Millennials: Whole Foods is opening a new chain of stores targeting Millennial customers. The new “365” stores will be “fun and convenient,” according to 365 division president Jeff Turnas, and will offer all the pretension of ...

Watching the Watchers
June 10, 2015
The imposing edifice of the security state is propped up by many tools. Mass incarceration, stop-and-frisk, and endless war (those old standbys) get help from Stingray devices, license plate scanners, surveillance blimps, and a thousand different ways to data-mine. Should we pin ...

Daily Bafflements
June 10, 2015
• This week’s DARPA Robotics Challenge had us wondering: Why, when have we set the bar so low for them, are robots still so astoundingly inadequate? Case in point, provided by the BBC: One robot, “nicknamed Running Man, was so confident on its second day finish that when ...

Shutting Up
June 09, 2015
This weekend, I used up one of my ten free monthly views of The New York Times to find film critic A.O. Scott declaring a national “humor crisis.” No, he wasn’t referring to any of his colleague Maureen Dowd’s perennial struggles with political humor; rather, he ...

Daily Bafflements
June 09, 2015
• Yesterday, Kansas City Business Journal released its Venture Capital issue, replete with a self-flagellating roundtable about why VCs aren’t investing there. One possibility they didn’t consider: Have the VCs been away betting on Innovation Economy winning the Belmont ...

Daily Bafflements
June 08, 2015
• A new currency minted by Russian farmer Mikhail Shlyapnikov has been declared “a threat” to the rouble by the Russian Central Bank. Five “kolion” will buy you a bucket of potatoes in Shlyapnikov’s village of Kolionovo. Shlyapnikov pointed out that his notes ...

Not Quite the People’s Court
June 05, 2015
With apologies to Marx, it seems that America has reversed one of his better-known aphorisms. Instead of history repeating itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, our spectacle-addled postmodern republic experiences it first as reality television, and then as politics. That, ...

Daily Bafflements
June 05, 2015
• The American Press Institute has recently released two reports on innovation in media and news organizations. PBS MediaShift takes a look at the measures being taken to get sometimes “fearful” newsroom staff on board for the all-important quest toward innovation. ...

The Kurds Are Alright
June 04, 2015
The Islamic State is a movement; therefore, it proselytizes. Plenty has been written about IS recruiting young people from the West. Much of the coverage has the timbre of “the kids aren’t alright” exposés on the secret sex lives of teens. There’s an almost ...