The eXile, the Moscow-based alternative paper founded by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi — and which has been home these past few years to occasional TAC contributor Gary Brecher, the War Nerd — has been shut down by Russian authorities.

The American Conservative -- Save the War Nerd

This just in: retroactive immunity, now in effect. (Well, not quite yet.)

After months of wrangling, Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress struck a deal on Thursday to overhaul the rules on the government’s wiretapping powers and provide what amounts to legal immunity to the phone companies that took part in President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The deal, expanding the government’s powers in some key respects, would allow intelligence officials to use broad warrants to eavesdrop on foreign targets and conduct emergency wiretaps without court orders on American targets for a week if it is determined important national security information would be lost otherwise. If approved, as appears likely, it would be the most significant revision of surveillance law in 30 years.

It's Legacy time. Read the full text of the bill, courtesy of the majority leader.

WaPo offers this:

ACLU and some Democratic leaders have argued that the bill does not go far enough in protecting civil liberties. The proposal would give retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that can show the court that they received assurances from government officials that the program was legal and that they have "substantial evidence" in the form of classified letters from authorities to support their position.

To quote Condi Rice out of context:

“Obviously, in any compromise, there are compromises."

From the archive, a favorite:

About the failure everyone now agrees. But what was the problem? And what should be done to make us safe?

It wasn't respect for the Constitution that kept the NSA from reading the "Tomorrow is zero hour" message until the day after the disaster. It was lack of translators. To meet that kind of problem, the Comint professionals have a default solution: more. Not just more Arab linguists but more of everything -- more analysts, more polygraph examiners and security guards, more freedom to listen in on more people, more listening posts, more coverage, more secrecy.

Is more what we really need?

In my opinion not.

But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

Deal Reached in Congress to Rewrite Rules on Wiretapping

If you use Firefox on an Intel Mac, you need this.

Uses PDFKit to display PDFs in the browser.

Excellent!

Firefox PDF Plugin for Mac OS X

To find stories you must give yourself to the moment. Time must weigh on you, its lulls, accelerations and silences. The life within, the deeper story, does not yield itself with ease.

It helps to be cut off, to have nowhere to go, nowhere but your story, and no excuse for not telling it.

I worry about stories dying, replaced by stuff. Content for platforms does not a story make. Today, you arrive anywhere and surf the Net. Being “always on” is being always off, to something.

In Praise of Being Cut Off

According to Paola, our kids started off right because she breast-fed them, which “opened their taste buds.” I’m not sure that’s scientific. It’s possible Italians are so haughty about their cuisine that they think even their breast milk is superior.

Internet metering is a throwback to the days of dial-up service, but at a time when video and interactive games are becoming popular, the experiments could have huge implications for the future of the Web.

“This is not something that lends itself to short-term solutions.”

“The continued success of GTA IV is not translating into big hardware sales for the PS3 or the 360.”

When the governments of South Africa, China, Libya and Indonesia support Sudan’s positions in Darfur, do they really mean to adopt a pro-rape foreign policy?

Since poorer Americans spend a higher proportion of their incomes on low-wage imports (shoes from China, for instance), trade can also be seen as favoring the less well off. If only politicians would stop preaching to them otherwise.

Age of Conan has at least the potential to become the best new massively multiplayer game since World of Warcraft.

New York City during the 1970s was a beautiful, ravaged slag — impoverished and neglected after suffering from decades of abuse and battery. She stunk of sewage, sex, rotting fish, and day-old diapers. She leaked from every pore.

And as they sifted through files and images on the hard drives, investigators found tons of material — orders for equipment, names and places where the Khan network operated, even old love letters. In all, they found several terabytes of data, a huge amount to sift through.

“Now is the greatest time to be bartering,” Scott Ebberbach of Itex, a bartering outfit, recently told The South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “Unfortunately, it’s that way because of the economy.” Unfortunately.

It’s true. I thought cheese was the color of a traffic cone, each slice individually wrapped in plastic.

Sharks take years to reach sexual maturity and, unlike most other fishes, produce small numbers of young, making them particularly vulnerable to overfishing.

Painfully slowly, the United Nations and its member states seem to be recognizing the fact that systematic mass rape is at least as much an international outrage as, say, pirated DVDs.

The religious advantage to embracing the evolutionary worldview is that it explains our frailties, our addictions, our infidelities and other moral deficiencies as byproducts of adaptation over billions of years.

Of all the strange and short-lived periods in the history of experimental music in New York, no wave is perhaps the strangest and shortest-lived.

In college, I had a friend named Kurt. A lot of people know someone like Kurt in college — brilliant, obsessive and kind of scary.

The Russians are coming from all over.

American and I.A.E.A. officials say that destroying one copy of an electronic file was more satisfying to the Swiss than it was reassuring to them.

Rio’s slums, or favelas, have proliferated and now may number more than 800.

Destee Nation is not selling nostalgia or hipster kitsch but romance — the romance of the American small business, the neighborhood diner, the old bar, the mom-and-pop shop that has managed to linger into the era of big-box chains.

I once returned home from a restaurant with a doggy bag full of deep-fried scorpions. The next morning, I poured them instead of imported raisin bran into my 11-year-old son’s cereal bowl. I wanted to freak him out. The scorpions were black and an inch long, with dagger tails.
“Scorpions!” shrieked my son, Roy. “Awesome!”

The idea is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes.

There are two main conclusions: First, when bubbles are not based on bank lending, the mop-up-after strategy still looks pretty good. When it comes to bank-centered bubbles, however, there are many more things that a central bank can and should do. But raising interest rates to burst the bubble is probably not one of them.

“Each season had a distinctive aroma and its own set of sounds. In the winter ... the smell was of heavy wool socks drying near the stove. In spring it was the black soil warming and the sound of returning crows. Summer brought the smell of the poplars and the sounds of rustling leaves, frogs croaking in sloughs. ... In the summer came the grasshoppers.”

Few things on earth make me more insanely excited than U.P.S. Especially when I’m not expecting anything.

The good news: More Egyptians today can afford to live like Americans. The bad news: Even more Egyptians can’t even afford to live like Egyptians anymore. This is not good — not for them, not for us.

The takeover was like wind blowing over a moth-infested structure.

“When you see this salt, sad, dark thoughts take you,” he said.

In Saudi Arabia I once met two young members of the National Guard, Saleh and Abdullah. As we drank coffee in a cafe, I asked if they knew anything about Jews and Christians. They didn’t, but Abdullah seemed curious. He said he’d like to read a book about other faiths, but none was available in the kingdom.
Saleh objected. “Well, what if you read a story and it made sense to you so you believe it,” he said. “It can reduce your faith.”
They both agreed: Better not to read.

... a working-class anybody from an anyplace deep in Russia ...

Much better is to use the option to reverse search, finding people who want Brooklyn and seeing what they have to trade. Put myself back in the driver’s seat.

It’s good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

She has given up everything but the T-shirts.

Behind every great pianist is a great tuner.

Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, laments, “The consensus is gone.”

In Fiona’s mind the medical paraphernalia of paralysis has an erotic power similar to that of the accoutrements of sadomasochism. An elaborate brace, for instance, is the ne plus ultra in sexy lingerie.

Trustafarians like John William usually grow out of their Prince Hal phase by their mid-20s, in plenty of time to make partner in Dad’s firm by 35. Not John William.

The farmer in Khujayli recalled a car trip with his father in the winter of 1954 near the city of Muynoq that began with a crossing of miles of Aral Sea ice. Now the shore is more than 50 miles away from the city. In the 1970s, his grandfather’s apricot trees died. Salt eats away at shoes here and turns bricks white. “For so many years we raped the land,” said the farmer. “This is the result.”

The journalists assumed that a slum under the thumb of a gun-toting militia, which included off-duty policemen, would be safer than one controlled by drug dealers.
They were wrong.

(Pretentiousness? That’s the noun form of the adjective pretentious, created by adding the suffix -ness. But wouldn’t it be better to use the shorter noun pretension? Or the even shorter noun, pretense? No; sometimes brevity asks too much. In the synonymy of pompous fakery, the mouth-filling pretentiousness goes beyond “characterized by pretension” to mean “affectedly showing off one’s claimed erudition or prestige,” as exemplified in this paragraph.)

If you’re not lucky enough to raise your children in China with an Italian mom, you could always try bribery.

Comcast says that people who use too much — like those who engage in file-sharing — should be forced to slow down.

Officials say some drivers are pretending to be out of gas, just so they can receive a precious, free gallon of fuel.

Even when they work, I find their furtive nature offensive.

At American, executives have heard loud and clear objections from flight attendants, whose jobs will become more burdensome as they police battles for bin space, especially as vacationing families load up.

(No one likes a proselytizer.)

You guessed right if you thought the toilets of CBGB's sang a song of diseased lust to my raging hormones.

Save waste fats for explosives. Take them to your meat dealer.

Only happy hookers write memoirs.

Hamas is Fatah with beards.

"The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market," wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in his 1919 dissent in Abrams v. United States, which eventually formed the basis for modern First Amendment law.

"Canadians do not have a cast-iron stomach for offensive speech," said Jason Gratl, a lawyer for the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. "We don't subscribe to a marketplace of ideas."

"Western governments are becoming increasingly comfortable with the regulation of opinion. The First Amendment really does distinguish the U.S., not just from Canada but from the rest of the Western world."

What much of West bans is protected in US