Month: August 2014

An update on Snowden

i wonder why we haven’t seen more snowden reveals in a while.

THE MESSAGE ARRIVES on my “clean machine,” a MacBook Air loaded only with a sophisticated encryption package. “Change in plans. Be in the lobby of the Hotel ______ by 13:00. Bring a book and wait for ES to find you.” ES is Edward Snowden, the most wanted man in the world. For almost 9 months, I have been trying to set up an interview with him—traveling to Berlin, Rio de Janeiro twice, and New York multiple times to talk with the handful of his confidants who can arrange a meeting. Among other things, I want to answer a burning question: What drove Snowden to leak 100Ks of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the government’s domestic surveillance programs?

Lumberjack Mythology

America has the most ridiculous mythical creatures the world has ever known. Hands down. Nowhere else has a mythology formed so beautifully in a perfect amalgam of too much whiskey, too little sleep, and perhaps some accidentally consumed magic mushrooms. The splinter cat is like a regular cat, minus any semblance of logic. This husky feline is an indiscriminate destroyer of hollow trees, which it mines for bees and raccoons. Climbing a tree, it propels itself off with powerful legs right into another, blasting the trunk with its wedge-shaped snout and reinforced noggin. The experienced frontiersman knows well “the moronic activities of the Splinter Cat. If the Cat finds food in the ruptured trunk, he is temporarily appeased. If not, he goes immediately for another tree. And right there is the big trouble. The Cat doesn’t use any judgment in selecting trees, he just smashes one after another until he gets a meal.”

ISIS

vice reminds me of CNN, when they were actually good (in 1991). very impressive work.

VICE News reporter Medyan Dairieh spent 3 weeks embedded with the Islamic State, gaining unprecedented access to the group in Iraq and Syria as the first and only journalist to document its inner workings.

The god effect

To intensify the ‘god effect’ in people already attracted to religious ideas, all we had to do was boost the activity of the neurotransmitter, dopamine. But should dopamine spike too high, murderous impulses like terrorism and jihad could rear up instead. The neurological line between the saint and the savage turns out to be razor-thin.