Monsters are Everywhere

"It could happen. Michele Bachmann has found the flaw in the American Death Star. She is a television camera's dream, a threat to do or say something insane at any time, the ultimate reality-show protagonist. She has brilliantly piloted a media system that is incapable of averting its eyes from a story, riding that attention to an easy conquest of an overeducated cultural elite from both parties that is far too full of itself to understand the price of its contemptuous laughter. All of those people out there aren't voting for Michele Bachmann. They're voting against us. And to them, it turns out, we suck enough to make anyone a contender."

"When attempting to maintain “law and order” (i.e. when attempting to maintain socioeconomic divisions and imbalances by maintaining a sacred belief in “private property” and ensuring that the profits of the wealthy are protected at all times), it is far better to encourage the public to believe that those who violate these laws are a small minority of black-hearted “anarchists and thugs.” It is far more terrifying, to the powerful and those who have bought into their ideology, to be forced to admit that any one of us, any average old do-goodin’ suburban kid, might be willing to violate those laws and morals at any time."

"We're feeling good and strong about ourselves again –and righteous –and that's often the fertile ground for more, not less, aggression."

[James] didn’t like losing detail when scanning in photographic negatives, so he repurposed an old scanner and turned it into a lightbox.

"I thought it would be funnier If I got left off the Eisner ballot, but I guess not!" said cartoonist Shannon Wheeler in a press release discussing the accidental omission of his I Thought You Would Be Funnier graphic novel — which is nominated for Best Humor Publication — from the online ballot. A revised ballot is now available on Comic-Con's website, but to make certain all eligible voters have a chance to read the sold-out book, publisher BOOM! Studios has made the entirety of I Thought You Would Be Funnier available to read for free online."

"The hell of war comes home. In July 2009 Colorado Springs Gazettea published a two-part series entitled “Casualties of War”. The articles focused on a single battalion based at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, who since returning from duty in Iraq had been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, drunk driving, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides. Returning soldiers were committing murder at a rate 20 times greater than other young American males. A seperate investiagtion into the high suicide rate among veterans published in the New York Times in October 2010 revealed that three times as many California veterans and active service members were dying soon after returning home than those being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. We hear little about the personal hell soldiers live through after returning home."

There are many well-documented reasons why the American media is so deferential to political power. Currying favor with political officials is how they secure scoops, leaks and access. Because media stars are now as wealthy and celebrated as the politically powerful whom they cover, they identify on socioeconomic and cultural grounds with these political officials; media stars are far more integrated into the halls of political power than they are outside of them. Whereas independent journalists are constitutionally inclined to scorn the powerful, employees of large corporations — by their nature — tend to be people who are revere institutional authority and are talented at flattering and accommodating those in power. And, as Jack Goldsmith recently argued, many establishment journalists are driven by what he bizarrely celebrated as "patriotism," by which he means fealty to American political officials and their actions.

"But then a group of French philosophers came to the rescue. They came up with a theory that said it wasn't bad to work with American military power. In fact, if the humanitarians could harness America's armed might, they could use it to change the world in a revolutionary way."

"Good books force you to challenge long-held beliefs and assumptions. Great books do this unexpectedly. For this reason, in many ways, Why Marx Was Right, by Terry Eagleton, is a great book."

"The ideas are helping to animate BioShock Infinite, a highly-anticipated game set in 1912 aboard a fantastic floating city called Columbia that is rife with conflict between a group called the Founders and group called the Vox Populi. Much of their motivations remain a mystery, but their schism emerged, Levine has explained, over the concept of American Exceptionalism, over the nature of America's place relative to the international community. Columbia's patriots preciously guard their gun rights and fret over the influx of non-whites to their society."

"In this article I'm going to make sure that everything I write is carefully constructed, so that I'm not potentially sued. For example, I'm not going to accuse anyone of outright plagiarism, as Jess Fink did. Just so we're clear, I'm not saying that. Legally, I wouldn't ever claim such things in print."

"a list of printers recommended by artist book publishers "