KPFA (Pacifica Radio in Berkeley) is using Returning Fire for their fund drive. They decided to play a bunch of the film and also interview me. Turned out to be a nice segment. I believe this will be available for the next week. Here’s the full interview:
Anonymous and Wikileaks made waves when they hacked and published the emails of a firm called Stratfor Global Intelligence, a surveillance company based in Austin, TX. The firm runs a system they call “TrapWire,” which claims to crunch untold terabytes of video surveillance data from all over the world to produce reports on suspicious activity [...]
After Julian Assange called Facebook “the most appalling spy machine ever invented,” The Onion sprung into action with this seriously incisive piece:
Apparently the psychology department at the University of Central Florida has been granted some defense dept. money to see which video game controller might be best for flying unmanned drones. Even stranger, they cited my article, which mentions the disturbing confluence of trends. If you want to know about advances in this arena see for [...]
Chrysler is marketing a special edition Jeep based on one designed for gameplay in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Goodbye Hummer, hello Jeep. This is an interesting reversal of the usual mimetic logic of war and video games. And of course it begs the question of what this metaphor implies about our highways and [...]
I was reading Johan Huizinga’s America, and I ran across this passage he quotes from de Tocqueville, which of course was circa 1840. The obvious fact suddenly struck me that perhaps the widening income gap has something to do with our increasingly vociferous political divisions. In America, which sounds like paradise… The wealthy are few [...]
A wonderfully evocative sound and video performance by Bob Ostertag just after 9/11.
Finally, someone says something intelligent regarding Bin Laden’s extra-judicial killing. Noam Chomksy sorts out the legal and political ramifications and contradictions.
With the explosion of the global economy, there’s been a lot of talk about how, as the US economy stumbles along, the upper 1% are laughing all the way to the bank. We have a blooming income gap and the makings of a two-tiered society. In the States this looks like the service sector supporting [...]
I just wanted to link a thoughtful review of Returning Fire by Neil Kiernan of V-Radio. The review is nested in some interesting self-reflections about his own upbringing and the influence of war culture. Neil has been kind enough to interview me a few times on V-Radio. In other news, the international distributor of the [...]