Back in January, I got a very odd call from an FBI Special Agent, who wanted to discuss a blog post I'd written summarizing a Popular Mechanics article on the physics of monument toppling, having received a complaint about it.
Thankfully, I have access to some of the very best civil liberties lawyers in the nation, namely my colleagues at @EFF. Andrew Mackey, an EFF lawyer who specializes in this kind of thing, had a talk with the agent, who agreed that I'd broken no laws and dropped the matter.
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Aaron did one better. He helped me draft a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI along with a demand that my record there be expunged, as is my right under settled precedent.
Next Tuesday, I'm helping Ed Snowden launch the young readers' version of his spectacular memoir "Permanent Record." Join us for a livestream event with Copperfield Books on Feb 9 at 19h Pacific.
Tonight I got invited to a virtual premiere of #BlissMovie from @PrimeVideo and they asked me to post about the movie afterwards.
It was...good. Weird. Good. Phildickian, ambiguous and very plague-escapist, a good and weird thing for a moment of great anxiety and hope.
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Parts of it triggered my, "Sorry, this isn't sf, it's just a cool eyeball kick" complaint, but then again, there was Selma Hayek putting in a genuinely spectacular performance, and Owen Wilson being a lot less goofy (modulo the nose!) than we've come to expect.
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Phildickian is not entirely complementary. I love PK Dick, but he didn't always make a hell of a lot of sense. Some of his most haunting stuff was his least coherent, but as David St Hubbins reminded us, "There's such a fine line between clever and stupid."
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America has passed four major antitrust bills since the Sherman Act of 1890. Each bill makes it clear that monopolism is a problem in and of itself - that allowing power to be concentrated into few, unaccountable hands perverts public policy and undermines the nation.
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For generations, American regulators fought monopolies because they were monopolies. But in the early 1980s, a disgraced Nixonite criminal named Robert Bork became Ronald Reagan's court sorcerer, backed by a coalition of ultra-wealthy plutes.
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Bork claimed that if you stared at the Sherman Act and its successors long enough, eventually you would have a holy revelation and learn that the lawmakers who crafted these bills - and spoke explicitly about their distrust of monopolies - actually really LIKED monopolies.
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