I am sitting in a room. It’s November 2nd, 2020, the day before the United States presidential election, half past eight in the evening, Greenwich Mean Time. The room is small, cluttered and only lit by cool dim LED fairy lights and the glow of my iPad. The only sound I hear is the whirrrrring […]
Tag Archives: Politics
Ten Years On
I’m going to write about something I’ve never really written about before. I had just moved back to Las Vegas, to my parents’ house, after a disastrous stint in Seattle. I had ended up homeless up there as a result of a lot of bad craziness, most of it mine. I’d ended up sitting in […]
An Open Letter to Rep. Shelley Berkley
Dear Representative Berkley, My name is Joshua Ellis. I’m a writer and web developer from Las Vegas. You may or may not know who I am — I was a opinion columnist for many years for the Las Vegas CityLife and I’m also somewhat well-known for co-authoring a series of articles about the homeless people […]
More Wikileaks thinking
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the whole Wikileaks thing these past few weeks, like a lot of people who belong to my particular sub-set of the human population. (First World, technology-oriented, somewhat politically minded. White as a goddamn ghost.) I’m massively ambiguous about the whole affair, which has earned me my fair […]
Wikileaks thoughts
Something occurred to me today; or rather, it’s been bubbling up in my subconscious for a while and finally came to the surface. I wonder why I haven’t ever heard anyone else mention this in public. (Maybe they have; I haven’t seen it.) It occurred to me that if I were working in either the […]
Shine A Light
Yesterday, Thanksgiving morning, I went down into the storm drains beneath Las Vegas with Matt O’Brien, my wife and some other friends to deliver food and supplies to the homeless people who live beneath this city. Eight years ago, Matt and I wrote a series of articles in the Las Vegas CityLife about the storm drains and the people […]
Finding Common Ground.
I was much inspired by Jon Stewart’s speech at the Rally to Restore Sanity, which I only got around to seeing today. (I had planned to attend the local Vegas edition, but I was busy getting ready to be married the next day, which is a valid excuse.) I was particularly struck by one thing […]
The value of music
So apparently a group of musicians in England called the Featured Artists Coalition have voted to support a “three strikes” law against illegal file downloaders: get caught three times and have your bandwidth reduced to a point where you can no longer download big files. It has not met with enthusiasm from the British blogosphere. […]
The Kitty Genovese model.
A couple of years ago, I delivered an incoherent, profanity-laden and probably awful lecture on the Grim Meathook Future at the Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin. (In my defense, I was completely unhinged due to jet lag and the meltdown of my MacBook the night before the talk, when I’d planned to finish my speech […]
The Iran thing.
John Perry Barlow called me a smug dick on Twitter tonight because I pointed out that the collective outraged Twittering about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rigging of the elections in Iran probably wasn’t going to change a goddamn thing. He’s half-right. I am a dick, but I’m not feeling particularly smug about it. (I also think JPB […]