Here’s something for all you crazy copyleft anarchists out there. An open source beer recipe some students in Denmark came up with as an exercise in creative commons-like open sourcing. See the BBC news piece: Free Beer! Just think, now that whole cryptic malted barley, water, hops and yeast conundrum is finally solved. We don’t […] More »

Allow me to draw your attention to a report on New York Attorney-General Eliot Spitzer nailing Sony for payola, the practice of bribing radio types to get airplay for artists. The immediate result was a $10M settlement and a promise from Sony to stop the practice, which is a more sophisticated version of direct “pay-for-play” […] More »

Thanks for everyone who has participated on this blog for the past year, it has been great fun. I’m off for a while. I’ll leave you with this passage from Timothy Garton Ash’s book Solidarity, which seems more relevant today than when I read it yesterday. At the very least, it might help clarify just […] More »

The Guardian today is running a 14 year old story on Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s abandonment of Marxism-Leninism as the official ideology of the Soviet Communist Party. Was it only 14 years ago? Back then (well, before then really — more like 1989 I imagine) there was a communist bookshop across the street from the […] More »

Britain does not have the death penalty. So say you were to walk onto a subway, drop off a backpack full of explosives, and subsequently kill a few dozen people. If they managed to catch you later, and were able to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law (where you would have […] More »

A spate of drownings in Ontario and Manitoba over the weekend has spurred renewed calls for better water safety and mandatory swimming lessons in schools. That’s from the CBC. The idea is being pushed by Carolyn Bennett, who I almost defeated in the 2000 election,. She’s still doing better than me: she has since gone […] More »

1. If you were going to spend 26 hours on a three-hop trip to Lithuania from Montreal, what podcasts would you bring with you? 2. Anyone know of any good Polish rock/punk/electronica/etc? More »

ooh boy, I know some ladies of the left who won’t be too pleased with this: Jane Pratt, editor, is leaving Jane Magazine in September. Jane magazine will no longer be named for its editor when Jane Pratt steps down as editor-in-chief in September. A successor to Ms. Pratt, who launched the young women’s magazine […] More »

My article in today’s Post, offering a warning Michael Ignatieff. Canadians should be wary of philosophers who would be king, but in the case of Ignatieff, he should be wary of us. (Subscription required) More »

“Autonomous Media: Activating Resistance and Dissent”, a how-to handbook on seizing the media, edited by Andrea Langlois and Frederic Dubois carries a sustaining metaphor of autonomous media as a bamboo garden. A single innocent shoot can stand alone for several years and then suddenly an entire field of bamboo begins to sprout…While on the surface […] More »

I’m off to eastern europe next week, till August 12 — Lithuania, Poland, and then either Hungary or the Czech Republic. Blogging will end this week and probably not resume till September. Meanwhile, I need to do some quick reading to prepare. I just finished Gulag by Anne Applebaum and The Captive Mind by Milosz. […] More »