E! Online has this to say about Polanski’s Oscar: “Only in Hollywood can Roman Polanski be a convicted felon and an Oscar winner.” True enough, since — as far as I know — Hollywood is the only place they give out Oscars. It would be difficult to be any kind of an Oscar winner in, say, Des Moines.
Sometimes people do amazing things.
David Neiwert updated with another post on fascism, this one discussing the risks of abusing the word itself. Like the rest, it’s good reading.
The Spokesman Review has a warblog with some cool material — there’s a nice piece on archeologist concerns regarding the war (original), for example. The Agonist is still my choice for up to the minute news, but the Spokesman folks are taking some interesting byroutes. Also, in the spirit of disclosure, I am tickled pink by the fact that they’re linking to me. Addendum: the Spokesman infographics (original) are nice. Hope they keep up that level of quality.
I probably should have created a War category, but screw it, too late now. Onward. A couple readers have mentioned that they were intending to donate to Christopher Allbritton but hadn’t gotten around to it. Donate now if you intend to; he’s about to leave on his trip (original) and it turns out — who’d have guessed? — that he won’t be able to get to PayPal once he’s in Iraq.
Not much else to do with my night but mock the Oscars; I wasn’t gonna, but the opening montage reminded me of how painfully bad some of the Oscar winners have been. Thus, they deserve it. It’ll all go in this post so anyone reading this on Livejournal is missing all the fun.
There’s a new blog out there called The Command Post. It’s kind of a group news warblog, but the bias of the contributors is distinctly conservative and they can’t help but let it seep through. A lot. So t.rev dropped me a line pointing out this post (original), which discusses the Fedayeen Saddam, Saddam’s — actually, they sound like his special forces units. The poster compares them to the NKVD, and to illustrate the nature of the NKVD, he links to… Delta Green (original). As in the game. He links to a discussion of how the NKVD battled a secret US intelligence group over Cthulhoid horrors. ...
Over the course of the last couple of months, David Neiwert has been writing a series of articles entitled “Rush, Newspeak and facism” on the potential for fascism in the United States. He’s a journalist who has extensive experience in this field; his articles are well worth your time. I don’t really have anything to say about these, which makes me a bad blogger, but sometimes you just have to pass along the important links. ...
Really, it’s like fish in a barrel. Via A Whole Lotta Nothing.
The evidence is in; some people really want an excuse to hate. So OK, Dixie Flatline. Hate away. Put yourself in that dangerous little corner of the human psyche. What happens when you cage yourself is simple; on Sundays, the tourists walk by and take pictures and discuss your strange case. Consider me a tourist. Here’s my discussion. In your rant, cloaked in the pretense of rationality, you claim that the loyalties of American Muslims must be suspect. You claim that we must watch them closely; the implication, bitter as quinine in your mouth, is that there is no other way to be safe from the threat. ...