Since we decided to stop attacking Fallujah, it’s turned into a theocracy (original). This should come as no surprise to anyone. I don’t think that crushing the city would have been productive either; you’d have gotten entirely different problems. Maybe it’s worth allowing the city to become an independent state in order to minimize the risk of Sunni unrest. Mostly it shows how many unpalatable alternatives we have in Iraq.

Current Gmail users have a couple of invites to the beta to give away. This has resulted in many offers of firstborn. In order to organize these offers, a clever person invented gmail swap, where people can post offers and the lucky few with gmail invites can pick the cream of the crop. For the record, this one is the cream of the crop. But only if you’re an Asheron’s Call player who’s easily amused.

This is probably the final post on the draft rumors. First, I looked a little deeper into the way Congress.org works. The original draft rumor was a Soapbox Alert, not an Action Alert. Action Alerts are associated with the organization that produced them; Soapbox Alerts have no attribution. Turns out anyone can post a Soapbox Alert. Anyone at all. There’s no way to tell who posted it and there seems to be no filter before a Soapbox Alert hits the site. I.e., there is no more accountability behind the original rumor than there would be from a message board posting on some random message board. ...

I’d like to return, at this time, to President Bush’s UN address of September 12th, 2002. The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant? ...

Looking back on the Dean campaign, I was dead wrong about how effective the campaign was at turning online energy into real world results. Despite the number of people willing to go out and do things in the real world, Dean didn’t win. He did raise a whole lot of money, and blogs continue to prove effective as money-raising avenues. However, they do that by getting lots of Internet-savvy people to contribute. Even in fund-raising, nobody bridges the gap between the Internet and normal retail politics. ...

The Civil War did not end in 1865…. The Confederates went into hiding and in 1908 they used their boy Teddy Roosevelt to found the FBI - conFederate Bureau of Inquisition. You heard it here first. I collect kooks for the purposes of generating weird NPCs for games. Possibly I need a kook category.

[Update 2: the original article wasn’t ever removed. A bit of software I use killed the link; the one I have up now works.] Now Warren Ellis (original) is getting sucked in by the draft hysteria. Time to grind out a counter-meme. First off, the two bills in question are H.R. 163 and S. 89. The record shows that S. 89 was introduced on 1/7/2003 and was referred to the Committee on Armed Services the same day. H.R. 163 was also introduced (original) on 1/7/2003 and was referred to the Subcommittee on Total Force on 2/3/2003. There has been absolutely no action on either bill since they were referred to committee. ...

Sadly, this time it’s a guy on the left abusing the definition of terrorist (original). Putting this in perspective: the KKK is closer to being a terrorist organization than the NEA (original), but nobody went to court to get the NEA legally defined as a terrorist group. The particularly vexing aspect of this case is the numbing effect it’ll have. The next time a real domestic terrorist is accused of terrorism, there will be plenty of people who’ll say “Oh, sure, like that KKK guy the professor wanted to muzzle.” Boy who cried wolf.

“In a roadside study, one in three reckless drivers who were tested for drugs tested positive for marijuana. It’s more harmful than we all thought.” Gnrgh! Meaningless! How many other drivers tested positive for marijuana? Was the ratio of reckless to non-reckless drivers different for those testing positive than those testing negative? Were all the reckless drivers stopped tested? The language quoted implies that they weren’t, so what factors determine who were tested and who weren’t? ...

For our thirty-eighth mashup we’ll go with an absolute classic of British television, The Sandbaggers. If you like espionage at all, I strongly recommend it. It was all kinds of tense and thoughtful; lots of each episode takes place in the offices of British Intelligence, where people are arguing about the ethics and practicality and safety of missions. And plenty of each episode takes place out in the field, where intelligence agents are not supermen.