Culture

On Thursday September 15h I turned the corner and found a surprise. A bunch of bigots protesting against one of the largest Mosques in the area. They were allegeded Christians from a group called officialstreetpreachers.com. They turned out to be the worst most hateful bigots I have heard in a while. The group's rental van was from Pennsylvania, some of their members were from Cincinatti and some from California.

“Subject to paragraph (3), the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or a designee of the Director (whose rank shall be no lower than Assistant Special Agent in Charge) may make an application for an order requiring the production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely

The whole internet has told David Benihoff and D.B. Weiss not to do it, but intoxicated with success from the hit series Game of Thrones they announced another partnership with HBO to create “Confederates,” a series based on the South winning the civil war. Rather than back off from the backlash against a bad idea, they did something I learned to never do on my Grandfather's knee, that is to double down on a bad hand.

With the second season of SyFy Channel’s The Expanse premiering February, it’s worth taking a closer look at the show’s first season through a postcolonial lens. This article contains minor plot spoilers for season one.

On August 16th former Miami Chief of Police John Timoney passed away after a brief bout with lung cancer. Prior to serving as Chief of the Miami Police Department he served as Superintendent of Police in Philadelphia. His obituaries in the Miami Herald and other news outlets, despite being laden with praise from his friends and former colleagues, failed to give his record of brutality and repression the spotlight it truly deserves in these trying times. It is rare when the liberal media gives American heroes the respect they have earned from a life time of service.

Pokemon Go is sweeping the nation and the world. Anecdotes and human interest stories abound. Like somebody who has been chasing some rare thing they can only see on their phone for hours, the public has Pokemania fatigue.

Privacy issues and stories about them abounded in the first days of the Pokedemic. I have not figured out what the game needs to access on my phone because I did not install it. I did have a look at how it works, and who built it, and the real privacy issues have not been given serious examination.

Saturday April 30 a cold hard wind blew into Columbus from Ontario. It was a Saturday showdown with the Tri-City Thunder and the stakes were high in this storm. According to sources that understand the complex math of the WFTDA ranking system, both teams had a great deal riding on the contest. The sources were tentative about the math both because of it's complexity and the dependency of the long term outcomes other team's seasons.

Please excuse my sarcasm. I love Game of Thrones. Even more to the point, I love A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series upon which the show was based. I've read all the books. I've won all the arguments with all the nerds on all the internets. I've been waiting for last night's reveal since the A Dance with Dragons came out.