Today’s video is “Running up that Hill” by Placebo.

Tags: friday music video, Placebo, Running up that Hill

I’ll start off by being honest.  I have no idea what the end result of all this will be.  I mean that too.  I really, really don’t.  But there are a few things I do know that a lot of people seem to have missed or to be willfully misinterpreting.

This isn’t a revolution for the West.  This is entirely a domestic event.  The Iranians saw their leadership blatantly steal an election that saw 85% turnout.  The Supreme Leader said it was divinely directed and the people could eat it.  This went over much, much more poorly than anyone expected it to.  In essence, this is a revolution FOR the revolution, not against it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: #iranelection, democracy, iran, islamic revolution, mousavi, revolution

This is pretty old, but it’s very cool, and helps explain why the Iranian opposition has been so hard for the regime to stamp out online.

Tags: bloggers, cool thing from the internet, iran

This is probably going to become a recurring topic, like “Friday Music Videos” and “Cool Thing from the Internet” and has largely been inspired by the weekend #CNNfail.

So I just finished reading this piece in Slate by Christopher Beam about President Obama’s political strategies.  In it, the author points out that Obama often illustrates his points by saying that fixing this one problem X will help solve other problems A, B, and C.  This is all true and accurate.  The Media Fail bit comes in when the author then goes on to spend the entire rest of the article talking political baseball and the relative merits and demerits of this as a strategy to get bills passed.

The correct response of course, would be to simply acknowledge that what Obama’s saying is A) incredibly true, and B) has been largely ignored by the Washington establishment since the advent of the “win the news cycle” campaign.  So instead of getting a substantive piece about how this new/retro strategy of admitting things are interconnected will likely yield significant gains to policy devising, and how it marks a welcome change that should hopefully reduce some of the “law of unintended consequences” blowback we’ve been getting from so many government policies recently.

Fortunately Mr. Beam decided to spare his readers that kind of analysis in favor of some boilerplate false equivalency (Bush had a narrative!  Obama has a plan!  They’re the same!) and some breathless “who’ll win the legislative battle?” lines.  Thanks dude.  For srsly.

Tags: christopher beam, media fail, slate.com

Before I get started on this, seriously, what is up with the years ending in “9″?  I mean is that just the internationally designated “rise up against your autocratic government day” or what?  And if so, what the heck happened to 1999?

Here are the known, undisputed facts:  On Friday, June 12, Iran held its presidential elections.  Ahmadinejad was declared the victor with 63% of the vote.  After that, well, things started getting crazy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: achmadinejad, election, iran, islamic revolution, mousavi, tianamen square

So my buddy Adam and I were planning to do one of those email pieces based on the old Rob and Rany on the Royals columns.  But I’m pretty terrible at keeping up on the emails, and us being under 40 means we text rather than email anyways.  (being over 15 means we text instead of twitter)  Adam’s stuff is in italics and preceded by an “A:” mine is in regular type and preceded by an “S:”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Adam Ross, Royals, Sean DeCoursey

From the category of awesome ideas that get made into websites we get:

Somali Cruises

Where the RPGs rent for $75/day and the night vision is complementary.

Tags: cruise ships, pirates, somalia