The Game Boy Advance SP is the best computer gaming device I’ve bought in two years and it’s a close second to my Windows PC as the best gaming device I’ve ever bought. It blows my Playstation and Playstation 2 away. Man, what a cool little device. I had an old Game Boy Color, and it was OK, but it did not have the superslick form factor of the Advance SP. This thing is small enough to carry around comfortably in one hand. Plus it’s got a backlit screen. Plus the CPU is powerful enough to do interesting games. ...

David Neiwert just published the final installment of the “Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism” series. Sorry about the self-link; he doesn’t have a table of contents anywhere. But he says there’s a PDF coming soon. Anyhow, this installment is fascinating material on the connection between religion and fascism, made all the more important and relevant by the recent Rudolph arrest. And, yes, it’s interesting when considering Islamic terrorism as well. Key coinage: “fascimentalism.”

It’s not time to vote yet. Maybe soon. Who knows? It’s a pretty tricky issue. The problem is that if elections are held now, you’re going to get either Islamic extremists or Baathist remnants in power. In many ways, Jay Bremer is right. The long-term goal of a democratic country would be poorly served by holding elections right this minute. This is not, however, news. Most anti-war people noted this problem many months ago. The problem is not that Bremer is putting off elections, it’s that he doesn’t have any clear plan on how to get to them — as predicted. Unfortunately, saying “So what will we do when we win?” was apparently a sign of anti-Americanism. ...

I just removed my RSS .91 feed, which should discommode almost nobody — I got about 15 hits on that feed over the last week, most of which were from Web crawlers. Conversely, I got seven hundred or so hits on my RSS 2.0 feed. Thus, I’m not too worried about discommoding people, and I’ll point index.xml at index.rdf just in case. Administrivia done; read on if you care about why I’m making the change. (Hey, he rants about things other than politics.) ...

I always wanted to know which states had lots of people with my last name. I just didn’t know it till I found this link. There are few of my kind anywhere, except there’s a cluster in Maine, which is completely expected. There’s also a cluster in Oregon, which doesn’t surprise me in the least cause I already knew about that branch. French names cluster in New England and Louisana. Scandanavian names cluster up in the Dakotas and Wisconsin and Minnesota. Cool stuff. (Via gtexts.)

Charlie Stross draws comparisons (original) between the museum losses in Baghdad and hypothetical losses of equal scale in London. Imagine London bombed. The V&A trashed, the Tower of London and the Crown Jewels looted, the British Library complex on Euston Road burned (along with all those annoying old bits of paper like the original draft of Magna Carta, the Gutenberg Bible, and so on), the Natural History Museum used as a defensive fortification and shelled. (Goodbye, Apollo 10.) ...

Campaign season has apparently officially started. Ari Fleischer spent more time answering questions about Bush’s campaign (original) yesterday than he spent on anything else, including this little gem: Q Secondly, on fundraising. Governor Dean has said that it’s a threat to democracy for any one presidential candidate to have two or three times more money to get his or her message out than any other candidate. Regardless of how much money the President plans to raise, does he see any merit whatsoever in that argument? ...

Bush is now claiming that questions about his justification for the invasion of Iraq are coming from “revisionist historians.” Saddam was a threat, and that’s that. Apparently he was the kind of threat who can be ousted in about two weeks flat — but maybe pointing that out is revisionist history. It’s probably also revisionist history to point out that Iraqis are killing more Americans per week now than they were in 2002. ...

WISH 51 asks: What are three genres that you’ve had limited exposure to as a gamer that you’d like to try or play more of? Hard question, cause I’m not sure what limited exposure means. I’ll take it as “haven’t played a lot in.” Lesse. Off the top of my head, I might say pulp, but I think the old Feng Shui games I’ve been in qualify. They were more Asian pulp, but pulp nonetheless. Dear old Clarice, British counter-terrorism expert, was pretty much a pulp character down to the quirky name for her gun. So OK, I’ve played pulp. ...

Everyone’s linking to this one (original), but what the heck — let’s dogpile. Rand Beers resigned from his position as a counterterrorism advisor in the White House just before the war on Iraq began. Not because he didn’t support the war; he did. Rather, he couldn’t take working for Bush. Beers had been working in the NSC since the 80s; he replaced Oliver North as director for counterterrorism and counternarcotics. He worked for Reagan, Clinton, and both Bushes. He’s a registered Democrat but it would be hard to argue that he dislikes Republicans. ...