Going Clear grabbed and held (and disturbed) me as few (non-fiction) books have. “Couldn’t put it down” is usually a cliche, but…
Reading this incredible story is as close to being in a cult as I’m ever likely to be. For my money, Scientology is far more frightening (and dangerous) than the Taliban.
Tom Cruise figured prominently in the second half of the book so I had to go back and take one more look at this video.
Probably my heightened awareness, but I’m seeing stories like this every time I log on. Airlines are racing to find a way to make business class seats more appealing. I found this NYT story especially interesting (and informative).
Lufthansa has a new business-class seat that can be yours for about $5,000 if you are traveling round trip from Frankfurt to New York. (Yeah, I think I’d pay that assuming I have the money)
Why so expensive? The story does a good job of explaining that, including:
“Each seat is hand-made and cost as much as a luxury car to produce. Business. First Class seats can cost between $250K and $500K.”
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.
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.
And you can embed a YouTube player to play your audio.
And one final one. Just a text link to the audio file (in the WP media library)
He managed to keep this up for much of the flight from NY to St. Louis.
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.
“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
“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
