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.

I’d been pretty pleased with the Freaks and Geeks DVD set through six episodes, but in the seventh episode the beautiful new girl in class walks into the room in slow motion to the dulcet strains of Billy Joel’s “C’etait Toi.” And Jason Schwartzman guest stars. Now I’m just wholeheartedly recommending it. 18 hour-long episodes, drama with a lot of comedy to it, teenagers in a Wisconsin high school. Not unlike That ’70s Show, except not played for laughs. Decent acting, mostly by people who didn’t act much before or after — I’m sure there’s a story to the whole ensemble and how the show got made, but I dunno what it is. Painful if you don’t want to relive your high school years.

“Today we have elves, stormtroopers and now superheroes,” Koster said. “We need to break out of the geek ghetto. No offense … I am one.” Wired is running the old mainstream acceptance article (original), except it’s about MMORPGs instead of comic books. And yeah, we all know how unpopular stories about elves, stormtroopers, and superheroes are. #2 movie of all time: Star Wars. #4 movie of all time: The Phantom Menace. #5 movie of all time: Spider-Man. #6 movie of all time: Return of the King. #9 movie of all time: The Two Towers. ...