Ironically, the Senate was trying to stop a potentially Communist Hong Kong from extraditing Chinese political activists from the States all the way back to Chinese prisons, but did not anticipate the possibility of an American activist seeking refuge in Hong Kong and turning the tables.

Also, a speculation that this scandal will destroy the US internet industry, as the rest of the world looks for search sites and social networking sites that aren't tapped. So the good news is, there might be a growing financial incentive for any nation to guarantee the privacy of its internet traffic.

Personally, even though I like Obama and think he's overall a good president, I would love to see him taken down and destroyed on this issue the way Nixon was destroyed over Watergate, even if it benefits the American right in the short term. Because in the long term it would set a precedent that would make authoritarian use of information technology politically difficult.

This was the exact feeling I had on an ego-death amount of mushrooms, and I think it's the essence of "tripping." Your brain is nothing more or less than a moment-generating machine, continually generating beads of "now" out of memories and sense impressions and placing them on the string of your conscious awareness. Mushrooms let you slow this process down until it becomes obvious, and if you're lucky you can hang out on the string for a while in a state of pure awareness without any "moment" in it. This happened to me once, and then I watched in slow motion as my next "moment" was constructed over the course of what seemed like a thousand years: The first thing created was my concept of "I," which I had forgotten about; everything else seemed to get filled in like a web, everything connecting back to "I," and it was fascinating to rediscover tiny facets of my existence in slow motion.

"We had a Zen master who visited my lab once," says Suedfeld, "and he asked to go in the tank for an hour. Most of his life he had meditated every day for four or five hours or more. And he thought the depth of meditation he reached in the tank was on par with a level he reached maybe once a year in his normal meditation environment."

Your brain is like a hill, and as information enters from the outside world, it's like rain running down the hill. It gradually carves rivulets into the soil. Eventually those pathways just become permanent little streams, and the water always runs down the same paths. The pattern that emerges is you. It's your personality.

Taking a drug like mushrooms or LSD is like dumping a bucket of water down the hill. There's so much water that the usual streams are overloaded and water spills out, crossing between the different paths. New and interesting connections form, and you see the world in a different way. That's great, every now and then, but if you constantly and repeatedly dump buckets of water down a hill, well then the rivulets disappear. You erase the pattern without forming new ones.

Completely off the usual subjects, I've been thinking about unusual house colors. The rarest color is black, which is strange since so many cars are black, and a black house in a cold climate would be good for absorbing sunlight. The second rarest house color, at least in America, is orange. Here's an amazing page with 138 photos of orange houses.

Hirschman was delighted by paradoxes, unintended consequences (especially good ones), the telling detail, inventories of actual practices (rather than big theories), surprises, and improvisation. In his view, "history is nothing if not farfetched." He invented the term "possibilism," meant to draw attention to "the discovery of paths, however narrow, leading to an outcome that appears to be foreclosed on the basis of probabilistic reasoning alone."

This is just how the system works. It's not a conspiracy. It's a perfect example of how a a bad system forces a bunch of rational actors to do absolutely batshit crazy things... Any real fix stands to hurt so many players that it's pretty unlikely we'll see change from a political standpoint. I'm kind of hoping the whole thing just collapses under it's own weight and something better can arise from the ashes.

That's a popular hope, but I'm not sure it has ever happened. Instead, bad systems keep going until they are outcompeted. The best historical comparison I can think of is the medieval church. For hundreds of years everyone knew it was completely corrupt, but it held a monopoly on salvation, so it didn't change until protestantism also offered salvation. So we need competing systems that offer medical care much cheaper... or in some cases they could just release us from the belief that medical care is necessary.