Month: August 2008

Salar de Uyuni

Over the last 10 years, Bolivia has begun using some of its extremes, like the vast otherworldly salt flats of the Salar de Uyuni, to its advantage. It’s become a booming hub of adventure and eco-tourism by appealing to the young and daring who are willing to exchange safety, comfort and convenience for thrills on the cheap.

NBC outsmarted

NBC, which owns the exclusive rights to broadcast the Olympics in the United States, spent most of Friday trying to keep it that way. NBC’s decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people across the country to their computers to poke holes in NBC’s technological wall by finding newsfeeds on foreign broadcasters’ Web sites and by watching clips of the ceremonies on YouTube and other sites.

the real villains are of course the IOC, which mandate all this nonsense. just like the sports syndicates force cable channels to pay a sports subsidy, whether you watch their crap or not.

Pledge of Allegiance

From its inception, in 1892, the Pledge has been a slavish ritual of devotion to the state, wholly inappropriate for a free people. It was written by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist pushed out of his post as a Baptist minister for delivering pulpit-pounding sermons on such topics as “Jesus the Socialist.” Bellamy was devoted to the ideas of his more-famous cousin Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward. Looking Backward describes the future United States as a regimented worker’s paradise where everyone has equal incomes, and men are drafted into the country’s “industrial army” at the age of 21, serving in the jobs assigned them by the state…Bellamy’s book inspired a movement of “Nationalist Clubs,” whose members campaigned for a government takeover of the economy. A few years before he wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, Francis Bellamy became a founding member of Boston’s first Nationalist Club

nice takedown on one of the many silly things going on in this country

Spooks 2015

To respond effectively to the changing strategic landscape, we need structures, people and systems aligned to ensure a unified effort, ready to adapt with greater agility. As we adjust to new challenges and customers, we reaffirm our enduring mission: to provide objective and relevant support to help our customers achieve decision advantage.

how spooks see themselves in 2015. lots of talk about user generated content, open source intel, etc. yet at the same time they have these ridiculous seals.