John Reed thinks his grandma poisoned a number of her relatives over many years. Maybe.

But here's the thing: You don't want to believe your grandmother is poisoning you. You know that she loves you -- there's no doubt of that -- and she's so marvelously grandmotherly and charming. And you know that she would never want to poison you. So despite your better judgment, you eat the food until you've passed out so many times that you can't keep doubting yourself. Eventually, we would arrive for holidays at Grandma's with groceries and takeout, and she'd seem relieved that we wouldn't let her touch our plates. By then, her eyesight was starting to go, so she wouldn't notice the layer of crystalline powder atop that fancy lox she was giving you.

So the question became: How did we explain to guests, outsiders, that they shouldn't eat grandma's food? One time, maybe on Passover, my brother brought his new girlfriend, an actress. Grandma had promised not to prepare anything, and it seemed she'd kept her word, so we didn't mention the poisoning thing to the girlfriend, but after we'd eaten lunch, Grandma came out of the kitchen with these oatmeal raisin cookies that looked terrible. They were bulbous, like the baking soda had gone haywire. My brother's girlfriend ate two of them, maybe out of politeness. We looked on, aghast. She had a rehearsal in the city, but she passed out on the couch and missed it.

Speaking of patents, this piece for GigaOm by Jeff John Roberts raised an eyebrow. Headline: “Google Sues to Protect Android Device Makers From Apple-Backed Patent Hell”.

First, it’s Rockstar whom Google is fighting — a consortium backed by Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry, and others. But given that Apple apparently put up $2.6 billion of the $4.5 billion for the Nortel patents that Rockstar now owns, “Apple-backed” is arguably fair. But “patent hell”? This is simply the U.S. patent system at work. There’s nothing egregious or extraordinary about Rockstar’s lawsuits against Google and Android OEMs.

Then, here’s the opening:

Google has filed a new lawsuit to challenge an Apple-backed consortium known as Rockstar that is using dubious patents to threaten its partners and customers in the mobile device industry.

Nothing in Roberts’s piece even attempts to justify the word “dubious” here. And he fails to address the elephant in the room: Google itself bid over $3 billion for these same patents — $3.14159 billion, to be exact, because Google’s executives and lawyers are such a fun-loving, clever bunch — which suggests that Google doesn’t actually consider these patents the least bit “dubious”.

With Silk Road kingpin Ross Ulbricht in custody, one imagines that a whole lot of his former customers are feeling a bit nervous right about now. And they should be. Buyers and sellers are starting to get arrested.

Charles Thompson might be a little nervous as well. As he explains:

In February of 2013, I decided to order one gram of MDMA from Silk Road because I wanted to write an essay on whether it really was that easy to click a few buttons and have a package of Schedule I substances arrive at your door a week later.

It was that easy. And that's the bad news. From The Morning News: My Brief, Binding Road.

Though the subject of abortion is a hotly debated topic, there aren't many parties who argue in favor of third-trimester abortions, a task that is only practiced by four doctors in the United States, following the killing of the infamous Dr. George Tiller. All of these doctors are former colleagues of Tiller's and claim an allegiance to their patients and any of their needs. Now the documentary After Tiller, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival provides information on these doctors' lives and the stance they have taken in their job about this controversial topic. But it's up to to audiences to decide how they feel in the end. Watch! ›››

Continue reading New Trailer for Sundance Selected Abortion Documentary 'After Tiller'

Fact 1: Writer/director Randy Moore shot his feature film debut, Escape from Tomorrow, at both Disneyland and Disney World without permission or permits. Fact 2: The Walt Disney Company hasn't said a word about what Moore has done, and his movie, thought to only be a Sundance one-off, is going to see the light of day. And thus we have the strange, surreal story of a family man's mid-life crisis in the happiest place on Earth. Escape from Tomorrow is nowhere near a masterpiece, but the sheer ambition on making what can be described as an "impossible film" is undeniable. Walt Disney's frozen head may even be proud. ›››

Continue reading Fantastic Fest 2013: Randy Moore's Impossible 'Escape from Tomorrow'

We have reached a point where nearly everyone can agree that the NSA has overreached on some margin. Where you draw the line depends upon you point of view—whether it was the broad surveillance overseen only by a secret court that did it, or lying to that court and the public repeatedly, or intentionally crippling the security protecting the enormous amount of economic activity conducted over the Internet—a very broad set of perspectives is likely to find something wrong here. What can we do to roll back this aggressive expansion of the surveillance state, and to lower the probability of it happening again in the near future? The best answer is the simplest one: abolish the NSA. Abolish it, and create an easy mechanism for abolishing agencies like it in the future.

Institutions matter. Bruce Schneier recently pointed out that we never managed to reign in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI—Hoover simply died. In his case, it turned out that all the practical knowledge and clout came from the man himself, rather than the institution. In the case of the modern NSA, the institution itself is what lends its leaders power, and not the other way around—their death or retirement are unlikely to bring us any better outcomes. The NSA has been doing this sort of thing for most of its sixty year history.

Public institutions, no less than the institutions of the marketplace and civil society, are emergent phenomena. The NSA is ostensibly under the umbrella of the Department of Defense, but it has long since grown into a fairly independent entity. Its leaders from the beginning have faced constraints in the form of budgets, chains of authority, Congress, and the courts. But just as entrepreneurs are capable of growing a business from an operation run out of a basement to an international conglomerate, so too are agency leaders capable of working the system to build up the power, clout, and practical knowledge of their organization.

In short, every time we create a new public organization which its own budget and leadership with a certain set of discretion, we are playing the lottery on how powerful an institution we will end up with. lottery. With the NSA, the citizens of America—and indeed of much of the world—have decidedly lost that lottery, and it’s time we took action to dispense with that practical knowledge and power.

Even if you believe in the importance of the NSA’s mission, there is no reason why a specialized agency is needed to pursue it. We have too many intelligence agencies as it is—just increase the signal intelligence responsibilities of the other ones. But if you insist on having a specialized agency, we would still be better off abolishing the NSA and starting from scratch, with an entirely new leadership, than with simply reforming the existing institution. Institutions have weight, they have inertia; as in most human affairs, preferential attachment is at work. This means that the last infraction makes the next one more probable.

But by that same logic, if we abolish the NSA today, it makes it more likely that we will abolish the next agency to cross the line in this manner. Moreover, we do not have to abolish them willy-nilly; it can be done in a way that makes the next abolition yet more likely. Ideally, we could pass a law that called for congress to abolish any institution deemed to have either outlived its purpose or to have crossed a legal or ethical boundary, and make it so that a simple majority is sufficient to move forward with the abolition.

Most of the dialogue I have seen surrounding the recent set of revelations seems to have focused on the shock of the audacity of what the NSA has done. Where change is discussed, it tends to be focused on mild reforms, perhaps going so far as to call for overturning the Patriot Act. But this is not nearly enough. We need to think in terms of institutions and in terms of what changes are going to have a meaningful impact on the probabilities of a range of bad scenarios moving forward. After getting away with overreach to the extent that it has, dealing with mild reform in the face of having their activities completely exposed is just as likely to embolden the NSA as anything else. Get rid of them entirely—do away with the decades of accumulated institutional know-how that they’ve refined into a weapon to use against us.