They Don't Love You, So Go Blow Up.

When I walked into work today, there was a sign labeled "Renaissance", with an arrow pointed to the right. Have I told you how long I have waited for someone to to FINALLY give me those directions? Figures it would happen when I had to go to work. I'm filing papers, and just down the hall is the Black Prince at Agincourt and Petrarch getting all weird over Laura and Erasmus. Fucking Erasmus. Like the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air whenever he sees a cab with dice in the mirror, I also knew that this sign knew where, but I said nah, back home to Bel-Air. Wait, no, fuck. Back to work.

In other news, this is a sad little study that just came out, via Wired's columnist Bruce Schneier:

"Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. He theorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States.

The evidence supports this. Individual terrorists often have no prior involvement with a group's political agenda, and often join multiple terrorist groups with incompatible platforms. Individuals who join terrorist groups are frequently not oppressed in any way, and often can't describe the political goals of their organizations. People who join terrorist groups most often have friends or relatives who are members of the group, and the great majority of terrorist are socially isolated: unmarried young men or widowed women who weren't working prior to joining. These things are true for members of terrorist groups as diverse as the IRA and al-Qaida."

Great. So even terrorists these days are people who just want to fit in and don't pay any attention to the news. I would have like to have thought that radicals were, you know, like radical. Individual and well-informed and only regretfully violent. Apparently not. Apparently terrorists are just like Hannah Montana fans with a lot more semtex, and with equal willingness to kill anything that moves to be the coolest, biggest Miley Cyrus stalker possible. Sigh. When the world has reached a point that indie scenesters are more authentic than al-Qaeda and FARC, you know you're marking off a very strange set of days on the universal calendar. Like the months of Sucktober or Weirdcember or something.

That Is All For Now.