Sunday Reading

Old Spice Chaucer:

US Interventions since WWII:

Without Money, No Family, by Boima Tucker.

Susie C, "Can we talk about coastal cultural differences in political protest yet?":

How Occupy helped labor win on the West Coast:

Earlier this month longshore workers in Washington state reached a contractwith a boss that has spent the past year fighting to keep their union out. That company, the multinational EGT, sought to run its new grain terminal in the town of Longview, as the only facility on the West Coast without the famously militant International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). A victory by EGT would have emboldened employers up and down the coast to seek to free themselves of ILWU influence. And if the union — with the help of the Occupy movement — had not defied the law, EGT would have succeeded.

How I Found the Human Being Behind Horse_ebooks, The Internet’s Favorite Spambot:

In his definitive profile of Horse_ebooksfor the comedy blog Splitsider, John Herrman noted the post-9/14 shift: "The Tweets were immediately weirder. The kinds of Tweets that used to take weeks to show up - the perfect truncations, the ominous declarations - were now coming fast and hard." Was Horse_ebooks playing to its newfound audience?

Unmasking Horse_ebooks might also, I thought, lessen my unease at having watched a spam bot gain stratospherically more followers than me, while being showered with a level of praise seldom applied to actual humans on the internet. Dozens of people declare their love to Horse_ebooks on a daily basis. Nobody would ever make a T-shirt with myTwitter avatar on it. If it could be proved that Horse_ebooks was guided even a little by a human hand, then at least it wouldn't be just a robot's unfeeling algorithms on the receiving end of all this adoration.

The ‘biblical view’ that’s younger than the Happy Meal:

In 1979, McDonald’s introduced the Happy Meal. Sometime after that, it was decided that the Bible teaches that human life begins at conception.