Author Archives: Steve Mays

The Blast Shack: Part 2

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Bruce Sterling has written a follow-up to his 2010 essay on Wikileaks. Here are a few of my favorite snippets:

The War on Terror has failed as conclusively as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations failed.

Even US Senators are decorative objects for the NSA. An American Senator knows as much about PRISM and XKeyScore as a troll-doll on the dashboard knows about internal combustion.

The authorities finally got around to convicting Bradley this week, of some randomized set of largely irrelevant charges. But the damage there is already done; some to Bradley himself, but mostly grave, lasting damage to the authorities. By maltreating Bradley as their Guantanamo voodoo creature, their mystic hacker terror beast from AlQaedaville, Oklahoma, they made Bradley Manning fifty feet high.

It’s incredible to me that, among the eight zillion civil society groups on the planet that hate and fear spooks and police spies, not one of them could offer Snowden one shred of practical help, except for Wikileaks.

Personal computers can have users, but social media has livestock.

iMovie Themes

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I’m exactly the sort of amateur Apple’s iMovie was created for. A set of simple, easy-to-use tools for editing those home movies. And it has some nice features I rarely use. Like themes. Here’s a minute of video and stills from Singapore (that I might have posted already) with one of the iMovie themes. Adds a little class I could never do on my own.

Penang Hill

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Sri Aruloli Thirumurugan is one of the oldest Hindu temples in Penang. It started off in the 1800’s as a small shrine to the Hindu deity Murugan – the deity associated with Thaipusam – by the Indian sepoys and sedan chair carriers, and is located at a mount within Penang Hill called Gun Hill.

Wikipedia

Mountain Stream

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Location on map »

Rebirth

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“You are lounging on a magnificent balcony open to the starry sky, divine music is playing with such exquisite perfection you can hardly stand it, when all of a sudden something terrible occurs: the magical sounds break up into an obscene cacophony. What is happening? Are you dying? You could put it that way. That awful noise is the first scream of an infant: you. You have been born into a human body hardwired with each and every transgression from the last time around, and now you must spend the next seventy years clawing your way back to the music. No wonder we cry.”

— Bangkok Tattoo by John Burdett

Who wants to die for a supermarket

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“The greatest weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that. What is the West but a gigantic supermarket? And who really wants to die for a supermarket?”

— Bangkok Tattoo by John Burdett

Americans can never be defeated by war

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“Without a war, America would descend into total confusion and would have to form itself into a police state to survive, because its people no longer have any internal structure. Americans can never be defeated by war. It is peace they find intolerable.”

A line from a novel by John Burdett (2005). As we wind down two wars and crank up the police state in America, Mr. Burdett seems frighteningly prescient.

Random images from Penang

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Maylasia

We were in Penang for 8 or 10 days of the two weeks we were in Malaysia. My brother drove us all over the island, in some of the most insane traffic I’ve ever seen (he said it was nothing compared to Jakarta). We snapped lots of images and this is our catch-all post. I’ll get around to captioning these in coming days.