Last Straw

Amazon has remotely wiped a book that people had already pur­chased for the Kindle (an ebook reader).
As John Gruber notes:
It’s one thing to stop selling them. It’s some­thing else entirely to remove them from the Kindles of those who already bought them. That this happened with1984, of all the books that have ever been written, […]

I received a link from Amazon today tout­ing a new book by Michael Han­lon:
Human­kind is not doomed, we may be around for mil­lions of years yet. We have already sur­vived one of the most extraordin­ary planet-wide cata­strophes  —  the Ice Ages. … The sub­ject of the book is very much in the news at the moment  —  will we be […]

Jonathan Cook on Dr. Shlomo Sand’s new book:
Dr. Shlomo Sand argues that the idea of a Jew­ish nation  —  whose need for a safe haven was ori­gin­ally used to jus­tify the found­ing of the state of Israel  —  is a myth inven­ted little more than a century ago.

In addi­tion, he argues that the Jews were never exiled from the Holy Land, […]

At the begin­ning of Feb­ru­ary, when I arrived back in Lon­don from a trip to New Zea­l­and, I was sur­prised to find my inbox full of mes­sages alert­ing me that a per­son named Ty McDon­ald had been fired from a news­pa­per for pla­gi­ar­ising me.

The mar­ket­place of ideas, like any mar­ket­place, is fit only for looting.

Kirk Mac­Gib­bon, a New Zeal­ander liv­ing in New York, says that Kiwi’s are pre­ju­dice against Amer­ic­ans and that this comes from, amongst other things, “their lim­ited under­stand­ing of Amer­ican for­eign policy.”

But we’re not the only ones to lack under­stand­ing. Much of the world mis­un­der­stands U.S. for­eign policy, espe­cially those who have to deal with it at the end of a gun barrel.

I spent my early teen­age years attend­ing a cath­olic high school where debate about the more dubi­ous aspects of organ­ised reli­gion was rel­at­ively open, so I’ve gen­er­ally had an atti­tude of live and let live; as long as people don’t attempt to impose their fairy tales on me I won’t get on their backs about how silly they’re being.

In terms of the war on ter­ror, who should be the next coun­try to invade? Read on to see some of the bet­ter res­ults of “engin­eer­ing consent.”