Late last week, a mysterious portion of the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Actions Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of the September 11th, 2001, which had been classified since the report’s release, was declassified following a two-year long declassification review. Know colloquially as the “28 pages” (the count is wrong but the name stuck), the document describes what the inquiry found regarding possible links between officials from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and individuals known to be involved in 9/11.

Read the entire article at Observatory Media.

Whenever I have to interact with big telcos, I inevitably come to ask myself why they are still in business. It’s a wonder that companies that are so big and so dysfunctional on so many levels still have any customers at all. I’ve recently had to do an ISP switchover from dual Cogeco 100mbps over copper to a single Bell Fibe 250mbps line, and my experience was less than stellar. Apart from getting the usual “oh, we’re sorry, your line isn’t quite active yet on our end” not once, but twice after the install tech’s visit, their business technical support was entirely useless.

For almost exactly three years now, I’ve been using a mid-2013 13.3” Macbook Air as my primary machine. As I explained in a review which has now disappeared with the demise of Epinions, I didn’t expect the transition from an expensive gaming rig to a super-slim, barebones laptop to go as smoothly. The idea behind the move was partially to make myself incapable of gaming during University, and partially to have a single machine through which I would use for all my computing needs. I wanted a “single pane of glass”, as it were.

Let me start this off by stating that I’m probably not the good person to review fiction. Following my review of The Free Market Existentialist, Dr. Irwin offered to send me a review copy of his recently released Free Dakota, and I gladly accepted after highlighting the fact that I hardly a literary savant. Reading non-fiction has the unfortunate opportunity cost of not affording me to read as much fiction as I would like, as a result I would hardly consider myself well-read in fiction in any of the languages I know how to read. Knowing this, take this review with a grain of salt.

I don’t like independence referenda, and Brexit was not an exception. As with all things political, they invariably end up being subject to manipulation from every side with skin in the game. Campaigns get real dirty real quick, and why not? In the end, the result is decided by numbers so compromise, the secret spice that makes mob-rule democracy somewhat functional despite all it’s pitfalls, is thrown out the window by all. Bitterness and mutual resentment grows, and usually  hangs on for a while, even long after the ballot boxes have been counted.