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Shop yourself into submission, at. . .

. . .The Chain Store.

Shackle Report’s online shop is open for Christmas, featuring all things shackle-related (however obliquely) accompanied by our painfully honest product descriptions.

For now we are pushing books and a bit of jewelry. But eventually, we hope to seduce you into buying a wide range of items that will help you escape the humdrum world of paying for things you bought in an effort to avoid thinking about how deeply into debt you’ve fallen.

And now, for a sample book:

Cosmos-politan

Cosmos

If you’ve ever wondered whether the human mind is a sort of shackle all on its own, this is the book you can’t finish that thought without. It is a new translation of Witold Gombrowicz’s classic (40’s) excursion into the joys and pitfalls of obsessive paranoid narrative, the nearly universal impulse to imagine that one thing leads to another. Droll, sexy and smarter than a slap, Witold has . . .

continued at "the chain store"

In the News December 2nd

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— The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

Reporter Ian Fisher, filing from Rome yesterday, for the NY Times

Human Rights Watch has released a list of 26 “ghost detainees” it says are being held incommunicado by the United States at secret foreign prisons.

— Oh, ghosts, great. As if Halloween wasn’t so over. . .

About 100 people are being held without charges in prisons outside the United States, experts estimate. . .
Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst for the rights group, said the list was the most complete possible. . .

— But you know how it is: Some people just never R.S.V.P., and then you get your no-shows and crashers.

“One thing I want to make clear is we are talking about some really bad guys,” Mr. Garlasco said. “. . .One of our main problems . . .is that if illegal methods such as torture are being used against them,” trials may “either be impossible or questionable under international standards of jurisprudence.”

— Yeah, but who said anything about trials?

The Bush administration has said it will respond to inquiries from European nations about the transfer and detention of terror suspects, insisting that American actions have complied with international law.

— That would’t, by any chance, be “international law,” ca. 1230, would it?