"I'd finally found Arkuat. Locked in a remote cabin, he was scrawling out his manifesto, where beer bottles shimmered over scattered bits of technology. I'm pretty sure he was building exploding duck decoys..."

"I was never sure if he knew I was there. But I started transcribing what he said, like a mad prophet. Yes, at one point I'd asked myself if he was just rambling drunkenly.

"But the more sobering thought was that maybe he'd seen too much, and was sending out a warning to us all." -- El Destino

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Sometimes people we love, respect, and admire, for good reasons, take a long tortuous road down a bad path. The bad path Richard M. Stallman is taking is hard for me to describe. I just have this hunch that he'd do more good for the world if he'd just compromise a tiny bit more. But who am I to criticize the strategic decisions of RMS?

The only real remedy I know against ancient earworms is a brand-new earworm. St Vincent just dropped a good one for me in Los Ageless.

Also, Peter Thiel appears to be human garbage.

I'm going to tell you a few things about Hunter S. Thompson's country. Hunter's country was the principal terrorist power on this planet since 20 years before I was born. And Hunter was born before I was.

"Alucard!"

Alucard is and has always been secret code for "I recognize that I am a citizen of the country that has been the principal terrorist power on this planet since long before I was born." That's why we say Alucard.

We recognize.

The starving babies in Yemen stand witness.

If you want to be a Pigdog journalist, you are going to have to bury your face in some shit, and if anyone pretending to tell you that there is a different way to be a Pigdog journalist, I will personally fight that motherfucker. I had a specific task in mind when I started giving lessons in being a Pigdog journalist. I did it for one reason, and one reason only. I did it specifically to piss you off.

I've been researching an article on Cambridge Analytica and Big Data. It's developing tentacles, but really, I'm working on my copy. Just so much research. You know about the SCL Group and the role it played in the Brexit campaign? Do you know what the Brexit shit is going to do to the border with northern Ireland? It's going to destroy the Good Friday Agreement!

I like how they use the word "audience"... Wouldn't we all love to have an "audience" like that?

Sweet, sweet Pigdog. Do not let me down in this time of general need. I believe that we have journalistic expertise to draw on within this Pigdog... You all know what we did in the '90s, but now our services are NEEDED. I've been shuddering lately with the realization of how we are going to have to expand and re-engineer the electrical distribution grid, also nuclear power plants, just to replace all of the fossil carbon we're going to have to stop burning. And I'm not even an engineer!

There is also this important matter of the liberation of psychedelic drugs. You guys know all about that, I'm sure, but we have been much too patient for far too long.

You know, ever since the election I've been feeling like a character in a Philip K. Dick novel. And let me tell you, brother, that is no kind of way to live.

I am goldbricking at my day job and listening to the Mothers of Invention perform the rock opera Billy the Mountain.

Have I mentioned that this last year I've been feeling like a character in a Philip K. Dick novel? And two years ago I didn't even know what that meant as well as I do now, because I read most of my Philip K. Dick in 2016.

For me, feeling like a character in a bad Dick novel means feeling a lot of paranoia that just doesn't seem necessary.

It feels ridiculous to me. Nonetheless, i continue to feel it. I'm constantly perceiving surveillance all around me, as if I was living in East Germany in 1988. I try to dance and work with the surveillance. You know they record every utterance you declare to the world. We always speak with a double voice nowadays. We speak to our chosen audience and we speak to our surveillers, in a single speech. As the stereotype has it, the white man speaks with a forked tongue.

So, full disclosure, I was reading a book by a man that I'm pretty sure many Pigdogs are familiar with, Bruce Schneier. The book is called Data and Goliath. I recommend it to you all. His next book, that he's still working on, is about The Internet of Things.

I heard the working title is "Click on This to Kill Us All"

laredo@pigdog.org