Owl Pellets: My Undigested Internets.

• • Conference goes down to The Wire | R&D Mag: Is The Wire Science Fiction?: – These people might be more right than they know. Just as most science fiction movies are really just action movies with aliens, The Wire always struck me as a science fiction story told as realism. It uses a lot of tools out of the science fiction box to tell its story. Specifically, it’s a tour through the machine – a method common to dystopian or utopian forms. Imagine Baltimore is an alien world and, if you’re an SF fan, you recognize the method.
  • Blackwater’s Secret War in Pakistan – The military intelligence source also confirmed that Blackwater continues to work for the CIA on its drone bombing program in Pakistan, as previously reported in the New York Times, but added that Blackwater is working on JSOC’s drone bombings as well. “It’s Blackwater running the program for both CIA and JSOC,” said the source. When civilians are killed, “people go, ‘Oh, it’s the CIA doing crazy shit again unchecked.’ Well, at least 50 percent of the time, that’s JSOC [hitting] somebody they’ve identified through HUMINT [human intelligence] or they’ve culled the intelligence themselves or it’s been shared with them and they take that person out and that’s how it works.”
  • The Architect as Totalitarian by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Autumn 2009 – “The most sincere, because unconscious, tribute to Le Corbusier comes from the scrawlers of graffiti. If you approach the results of their activities epidemiologically, so to speak, you will soon notice that, where good architecture is within reach of Corbusian architecture, they tend to deface only the Corbusian surfaces and buildings. As if by instinct, these uneducated slum denizens have accurately apprehended what so many architects have expended a huge intellectual effort to avoid apprehending: that Le Corbusier was the enemy of mankind.”
  • Letter From Saddam to the American People – Thank you America for making Saddam make sense.
  • Despite tough times, bespoke suits make the cut – The Globe and Mail – A short article on bespoke, hitting on the usual themes and benefits.