First, in a fit of irony, the Creationists behind the movie Expelled created a video to lampoon atheist scientist and critic of religion Richard Dawkins. Except to any athiests watching, Dawkins actually comes out looking awesome. ("I'm smarter than you, I have a science degree," raps Dawkins in the video. And he is probably smarter than you, and, yes, his science degree does make him more qualified to talk about things like the origin of the universe than someone whose scientific education revolves around the Bible.)

Meanwhile the Ayn Rand branch of the Republican party are busy trying to put together events to protest bailing out homeowners. Cause, you know, giving money to poor people is so un-Christian. (The meshing of the pro-big-business libertarian mindset with Christians whose doctrine tell them to give to the poor and that a rich man has a hard time entering the kingdom of God and so on never made any sense to me at all.) No, don't give the money to the homeowners, give it to the banks who lent them the money in the first place and then repackaged it on the market and screwed up our whole economy. That's SO much better.

Meanwhile, Amazon reveals that it can cancel your Kindle account at any time, making the device you paid $400 for instantly useless. This is why DRM'd books are a bad idea, as I talked about in my review of the Sony Reader. If you're considering buying an ebook reader, for the love of god buy one that reads unencrypted ebooks, and not not not the Kindle.

Don't believe me that DRM is bad? I have mixed feelings about Cory Doctorow's fiction, but when speaking about DRM he has a knack for putting things in the right perspective. Here's his talk at the TED (Tools of Change for publishing) conference:

And lastly, thank God Time Warner Cable caved in and decided not to meter people's Internet usage anymore. If they'd tried that shit in NYC I would have switched to DSL so fast there'd be a blur where my cable jack was.

Have a good weekend everyone!

So Amazon is claiming that this is a glitch and that they will be making a statement in the morning.

As my previous post from this afternoon should make perfectly clear, this is not an accident. It's obvious that pro-feminist, pro-sexual health, pro-LGBT, and pro-sexuality work has been targeted in this nonsense. What's become even more apparent is that Amazon's initial response does not take seriously the severity of this charge. This cover-your-ass sort of stonewalling that came as a sort of knee jerk reaction from Amazon is old-style corporate BAU that is no longer tenable in the new age of rapid response social media. One thing that it appears lefties have learned from the Obama Experience is how to make ourselves heard and responding more quickly to corporate information in the wider arena of discourse than traditional corporate communication is capable of. To whit, by the time Amazon gave its half-assed response to the firestorm of bad PR it waded into today, the community of grassroots activists had already been sharing information and doing research that outpaced Amazon's ability to do damage control.

Whether or not this is the birth of Web 3.0 is a question I'll leave to the geeks. As a critic, I think that this is a significant demonstration of guerilla grassroots organizing on a distributed model that could well have strong implications for the way politics is conducted in the future. Moreover, what needs to be recognized out of this is that there are techniques that guerrilla netroots needs to learn and adopt to become even more effective in future.

Twitter and Ed Champion are trying to save the world again.

This time they're absolutely fucking right.

Boycott Amazon.

Read the details here:
http://www.edrants.com/amazonfail-a-call-to-boycott-amazon/

More on Amazon Rank

The idea then remains a question of apperception. One might look at the issue of tissue damage. Sexual assault, as usually construed, is an act of penetration. The cock, representing an aggressor, weaponlike, is wielded by the rapist as a viscous instrument of punishment and also the pen by which the signature is applied. The victim in this circumstance is then marked. The tissue damage whether vaginal, rectal, nasal or what have you then is more than the mere dross or aftermath of the act of decoupling, the coupling of which is always already becoming the being-for-damage bleeds and bloodied into the decoupling not just of anatomy but also the decoupling of humanity from subject. Here then is the victim as object. The victim as work.

Pornstar nyodene apercus once wrote that the essence of all freedom is encapsulated in the moment of a single, unwanted penetration. She has described her rape at age fourteen as the single most liberating moment of her life. She argues in her autobiography for a naive Hegelian dialectic that takes place in involuntary intercourse. THe rapist master defeats the victim/slave in a contest of wills, and as a result, the victim slave is overcome by a forced carthasis bringing about a total awareness of her own Being-in-the-World. Nyodene says her eyes were opened by how small a thing it was, and she describes looking down at her tattered hymen as the er nurses attempted to staunch the bleeding of her torn rectal tissue and for the first time in her life feeling "completely, terribly, free."

Gave my personal site, a redesign today. It needs to be brushed off and made to look pretty again every once and a while. It also now incorporates my master feed which aggregates Wet Asphalt, Delicious, Twitter, and my brand new writing blog.

I decided there were certain things I wanted to ramble on about writing and publishing my own work that don't fit in with Wet Asphalt. So the new blog will be about what I am writing and my efforts to get it published, with more specifics laid out in the first post there.

To sum up:
Eric Rosenfield.com redesigned
New writing blog.

My Little Brother by Cory Docotorow is up over at Literary Kicks. Here's an excerpt:

One thing you have to say for Little Brother, Cory Doctorow's recent book for young adults (now nominated for the Hugo Award for best novel): it's ambitious. It is an adventure story about teenage terrorism that's also a screed on the importance and meaning of the right to privacy and a guide to bad government practices and how to fight them, a novel made manifesto and handbook. The book tells us, for example, why anti-terrorism measures like ramped-up airplane security are bad, or how to safely destroy the RFID tag in a passport. It's useful. It's also pretty blatant propaganda, and it is its nature as a work of propaganda that ultimately undermines its effectiveness as a work of fiction.

Go read the rest.

Casuistry of The Seas

Folklore holds various alternate positions that one might
require to be re-appropriated quietly while they do not pay

attention that could very much be consumed by the creep
of yellow mold and a vinegary sort of flavor left on the back

of a tongue spending too much time tasting and not enough
at the other things that tongues are useful for.

So no, I don't buy into all of this, I don't accept what might be
accepted as a sort of palliative to the general ebb of things.

But, stuff being what stuff being is stuff, stuff can otherwise
come in useful which stuff being sort of kept but resented

with a sort of turned up sort of attitude, where turned down
might remain the motions that have been or what else

the takenness of things that put in a lot of pressure,
barometric or otherwise, the point is that it increases

that ears pop, that I end up with the bends and my blood
overoxidizes and that's that then, and leave the rest
of it all for future generations to dissect and to analyze.

Greenpoint Brooklyn, 1999

Czech rebel I remember not so much the rest dear
America what pieces of me will you keep?

It was 99 cents and yeasty and so good cold
and I don't know that anybody paid rent there

but there we were and what love I did not yet think
I knew. Dear America, do you have in small cedar boxes

my pieces of the East River that have kept me rapt
where wrapped I have held summers like that.

Dear America, do you remember that the dope
was dry shake all stems and seeds all cut with

ephedrine in glycerine capsules melting micro
dots under our tongues. What is still dear, America

this place that I come back to, sweating now in
recollection the collected plaster crumbles like snow

field raptures like me like we have never been called
dear, America. Still. Still in with the cheap stuff distilled

from the meltwater in summer, maybe tho but for
but for the condensation, the sweat on the bottle

and sweltering like we do. Dear America, we've had our
differential equations, our earthquake laser targetting

systems like eye beams the railing we have railed
our Laotian season, we tho quiet, a Graham Greene

quiet of us dear, America I have questions. I have a list
of requirements. I have unmet demands and tattoos

on the skin inside my mouth where ink like burnt skin
hangs down and scrapes against my tongue so slainte

we like our arm chair irish famine anarchists drink our own health and wonder
yet at another year dear America, we have got at least one more.

Today is the birthday of great Ukrainian/Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. It's fitting that a writer of humor and satire would be born on April Fool's Day. Now, go read The Nose