Latest Blog Posts

• Fauci Takes the Fifth

  Wow. Holy shit. Fauci just took the Fifth in the COVID-19 pandemic hearing in the Senate. He is refusing to answer any questions. He keeps quoting that his lawyers advised him to not answer any questions. His hands are shaking.

  This is a scandal.

  Screenshot: C-SPAN

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• The Cockroaches Get Modi to Back Down

  Well, it looks like those cockroaches really got some stuff done. What a success story! Amazing what the internet can do.

  Indian youth protesters have called off weeks of demonstrations and celebrated in the streets after the education minister quit and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government bowed to demands including calls to fix a cheating-prone exam system.

  The worst political crisis of Modi’s third term in office had peaked this week when thousands of protesters marched on parliament, with police using tear gas to control them. Young voters form a critical base of his Bharatiya Janata Party. But youths calling themselves “cockroaches” had taken to the streets since late June, after national exam papers were leaked, forcing a resit that affected 2 million students and galvanising anger about the lack of prospects for young Indians. The resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, the students’ primary demand, came as a surprise because Modi has a reputation for refusing to act under pressure.

  Modi’s party faces key state elections next year. Similar youth-led protest movements brought down governments in neighbouring Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh in recent years.

  → India’s “cockroach” protesters claim surprise victory as government accepts their demands, The Sidney Morning Herald

  It seems these “Discord revolutions” are a new factor on the political scene that has to be reckoned with going forward.

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• My Last Email from Dvorak

  While looking though my email archive this morning, I found this email by John C. Dvorak, where he replied to me sending some information to the No Agenda show. This was less than a month before his death. That signature made me laugh every time I saw it. What a character! 😄😭

  SENT from my bakelite rotary phone
  one letter at a time

  

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• John C. Dvorak Has Passed Away

  I just learned that John C. Dvorak has died on Monday. JCD had a heart attack earlier this year, but he was doing much better and I just listened to the last No Agenda episode he recorded on Sunday (episode 1887) this morning, so this comes as a bit of a shock.

  I will miss John very much. He was one of my journalistic heroes. He almost single-handedly alerted me to all the bullshit that goes on in Silicon Valley and that it wasn’t an exception, but rather the standard modus operandi in that part of the tech industry. Calculated to mislead the public by generating a lot of overblown hype to sell more product. John stood up to this crap for decades. He was one of the journalists who, through his work, encouraged my natural scepticism and my inherent tendency to always ask questions when everyone around me would just accept something. He taught me that this is a good quality in a journalist — and every other human being for that matter — one that we want to encourage, rather than an annoyance that is to be chastised.

  We need more people like John C. Dvorak in this world, not less. People who want to get at the truth of the matter, rather than placate other people’s emotional or financial needs. His tendency to always ask the next question, to never accept conventional “wisdom” and to just be the one stubborn old man in the room (even when he was quite young) who will always take the more unpopular — but probably closer to the truth — side of the argument will be sorely missed. This is a bad day. For tech journalism and for the world at large. Goodbye, John. I know that, wherever you are now, the powers that be over there are not to be envied. Give ’em hell!

  John C. Dvorak (1946 - 2026) — journalist, podcaster, curmudgeon (Photo: No Agenda)

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