http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-vanishing-20090226 "Like the Hawaiian crow and the Chinese river dolphin, Costa-Gavras's 1972 Uruguayan political thriller State of Siege is effectively extinct. While it survives in a few, used VHS versions (you can get one through Amazon.com at $159.99)...

*When even the calm, scholarly eco-geeks get into Rush-bashing, you know it's the New Normal in American political discourse. *Looks like Rahm really gets it about Rove. This polarizing, raw-meat, intensify-the-contradictions thing, that's the Rove handbook. The one great novelty in the culture-war ...

*One can expect to hear a great deal more rhetoric like this, and it is going to get weirder and less comprehensible rather than more so. "Opening Exhortation "To All Those Who Fight 4: Anarchy, Autonomy, Ecology, Queerness To all media activists, creative workers, radical artists, union organizers,...

*Restructuring: after your arms and legs are smashed off with hammers, you miraculously learn how to wriggle toward prosperity on your belly. *Y'know, I haven't had a real job in ages, but now even the people with real jobs don't have real jobs. *If even half the stuff on this list is true, we're in...

*American retailers desperate to foist their inferior goods on the British! Pick up your skirts and run for the trenches! http://www.britishdesigninnovation.org/?page=newsservice/view&news_id=5503 Inspire or die! (((The British slogan in the 1950s was "Export or Die," and, as Brian Aldiss once point...

*Another one of those "Detroit stories," sighed the urban farmer as he fed the scrap dealers... http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2b815a94-0863-11de-8a33-0000779fd2ac.html (...) "For decades, scribes from America’s coasts and beyond have been parachuting into Detroit to marvel at its horrors. The city nev...

*Gosh, this is taking life pretty hard, Matthew. If you think GREAT BRITAIN has got it tough, you ought to look at the parlous state Antarctica is in. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/matthew-norman/matthew-norman-turn-us-into-the-51st-state-why-not-1637570.html The upsides of the U...

"The single biggest source of prostitution in the nation." arstechnica:  Sheriff files lawsuit over Craigslist's red-light district - http://ping.fm/IivHP http://ping.fm/IivHP...

*Well, what the heck, *I'm* surely going to this... PLUTOPIA CONVERGES ON SXSWi WITH GRAND FUTURIST VISIONS LACED WITH ROCK AND ROLL March 1, 2009 (Austin, TX) – As SXSWi has grown in popularity, attendance has swelled and corporate-sponsored parties have popped up like mushrooms in cow shit. The ...

*Y'know, I don't normally post these RE/SEARCH emanations, but every once in a while somebody blunders onto this website through a Google search, and then they read one of these V. Vale things and their head explodes.  Makes it worth it right there. *I ran into Vale  a few months ago in Ba...