Here’s to peace. And those who get in the way of it.

Fleabag

Fleabag

Belinda: There’s nothing more exciting than a room full of people.

Fleabag: Yeah, except that most people are …

Belinda: What?

Fleabag: Shit.

Belinda: Look at me. Listen. People are all we’ve got. People are all we’ve got. So grab the night by the nipples and go flirt with someone.

Tiki Bar TV, “Interlude”

The United States has real responsibility for the climate change, for the warfare, for the economic undevelopment of the countries being abandoned by these people. We’re not pure watchers. The same corporations that make money here are making money there and under conditions that drive large numbers of people to leave and come here.

Economic Update, “A Socialist Politician Wins”

David Byrn and St. Vincent, “Road to Nowhere”

More of the concert on YouTube.

Uncorrelated (stereo) pink noise.

Correlated (mono) pink noise.

Neal Stephenson, “Fall, or, Dodge in Hell”

The result of her having filled out a form, years ago … and having clicked the “submit” button. Which, come to think of it, was a pretty strenge bit of semantics.

Their fathers believed that the people in the cities actually gave a shit about them enough to want to come and take their guns and other property. So they put money they didn’t really have into stockpiling trilliions of rounds and hunkered down waiting for the elites to come confiscate their stuff. There’s no use for any of it.

If you were setting up a real military, here’s what you wouldn’t do: you wouldn’t issue every single guy his own collection of 57 different small arms and an infinite quantity of ammunition and nothing else.

The Utah state legislature had been taken over by Moab truthers who insisted that Moab had been obliterated by nuclear terrorism twelve years ago. From which is followed that anyone claiming to actually live there was a troll, a crisis actor in the pay of, or a sad dupe in thrall to, global conspirators trying to foist a monstrous denial of the truth on decent folk.

I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and become more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And I think that the main thing it conferred on people was social mobility, so that if you were a smart kid growing up on a farm in Kandsas or a slum in India you had a chance to do something interesting with your life. Before it—before that 300 year run when there was a way for people to agree on facts, we had kings and warlords and rigid social hierarchy. During it, a lot of brainpower got unlocked and things got a lot better materially. A lot better. Now we’re back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.

Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.

Walton, Belshazzar’s Feast

We don’t need you to speak for us. We already have a voice. We need you to pass the microphone. Let us speak for our communities.

Adrian Rivera-Reyes, in an interview with Jacobin Magazine

The nonprofit industrial complex produces a lot more direct mail than direct action.

Liza Featherstone, “The Scale of the Problem”

It’s easy to overlook the fact that you’re already in a union with the mates you endure crap with at work. It just doesn’t have a fancy label yet.

Alex McIntyre, “Pub Workers of the World, Unite”

House in the Gorafe Desert, Granada, Spain

Elections are not democracy, whether in Africa or elsewhere. Central is the respect for two basic principles that define the relationship between a government and society: the right to free assembly and the right to free speech. Both are needed for any popular movement to function, and so any government that holds elections while clamping down on protest simply should not be viewed as democratic.

Adam Branch, “Africa’s Road to Democracy”

He’d never quit anything in his life. There’s no need to make a big fuss just because you disagree with someone; you stay where you are until things improve, and you do what you can to help things along. It goes without saying and you shouldn’t have to be told. Adherents to this creed usually adopt it when young, and can barely imagine a world beyond it. As creeds go, it’s mild, unpresumptuous, hardly worth repeating. This is its general appeal.

John Darnielle, “Universal Harvester”