The Cold Planet

Xeni Jardin, Internet geek and Boing Boing co-founder, tweeted her first mammogram to make the scary go away. Instead, she learned she had breast cancer, which had spread to a lymph node. A moving account of arriving at "the big unknowable," where the gravity is different and the trick, say fellow-travelers, "is to accept the not knowing." Mammograms, ladies. "I do not know all of what's ahead. I know a little. I know that there is a new kind of life on the other side of this thing..."

Read more

Shooting Judges, Pet Dogs, Fast Drivers and Pretty Much Everything In Sight

Blackwater's "protective services" in Iraq consisted in large part of indiscriminately shooting any car that drove near its convoys, according to 4,500 pages of records acquired by Gawker four years after requesting them under the Freedom of Information Act. Uploaded to Document Cloud.

Read more

Overkill: Sending Drones After Cattle Rustlers

A bizarre story out of North Dakota, where a sheriff called in a SWAT team, bomb squad, and Predator drone from nearby border patrol to arrest a family of alleged sovereign citizens for stealing six cows, the first - but we suspect not the last - drone-assisted arrest of a U.S. citizen. Excessive firepower and troubling privacy issues, much?

Read more