I was thinking about doing my year’s best film list, so I wandered over to IMDB to look at their list of the top movies of 2002 by popular vote. It’s just weird. I am not surprised that some movie fans decided to push their favorite flick to the top of the charts. Duh; it’s an online vote. That’s what happens. But from all appearances, we have a bunch of separate groups all pushing frantically without any hint of trying to pull down someone else. You’d think that the Nine Inch Nails fans might want to cement their number 1 position by voting against the obscure Polish flick, maybe. And where are all the people who hate Michael Moore? How did Bowling for Columbine rack up a 9.0 average over 4,986 votes?

As pretty much everyone who cares knows by now, Sean Penn recently visited Iraq and was promptly used by Saddam Hussein for propaganda purposes. You have to hope he wasn’t surprised by this. I thought it might be interesting to see what he actually said, though, since it’s been somewhat under-reported. Quotes are from various sources; search Google (for the next 30 days or so, at least) for cites. “I am a citizen of the United States of America. I believe in the Constitution of the United States, and the American people. Ours is a government designed to function

“In sports, the New England Patriots win the Super Bowl, thus using up all the sports luck that New England has been accumulating for decades, and thereby guaranteeing that the Red Sox will not win the World Series for another 150 years.” Dave Barry’s year-end report is up.

Glenn Reynolds notes that North Korea supports US unilateralism, but somehow fails to miss the irony inherent in the idea that this new supporter of Bush’s policies is one of our biggest foreign policy headaches. Me, I find it amusing. “You were right, guys; the North Koreans are in our corner!” OK, OK, some real commentary. This is kind of interesting. Who does North Korea want uninvolved? Answer: Japan and of course South Korea. Japan in particular is likely to be more worried about North Korea than we are, because Japan is a lot closer and definitely within North Korean missile range. In fact, Japan is strongly considering sanctions against North Korea. That’d have a fairly major impact. North Korea would love it if the US discouraged Japan from taking action. Japan’s more likely to take painful action (from the North Korean standpoint) than is the US. ...

I cannot believe that they’re giving Alfonso Cuaron the reins to the Harry Potter movie franchise. I honest to god officially can’t believe it. Not that I think it’s a bad thing, but I have to wonder: how many of his movies has J. K. Rowling seen? The thing is, I watched Great Expectations over the weekend, and it just blew me away. Cuaron had the chutzpah to turn Dickens into a sensual, almost erotic reverie. It’s a movie about passion, and passion lost, and passion recovered. It’s a movie about how much people mean to one another: Finn to Estella, Estella to her mad aunt Ms. Dinsmoor, Finn to his brother-in-law Joe, and so on. ...

Daily Kos asks how Southerners get away with displaying the Confederate flag (original). Well, you know, it is a symbol of Southern pride. Recognizing that is just as important as recognizing that US arrogance pisses off the rest of the world, sometimes. The issue here is that the Confederate flag has two meanings, and the second darker meaning is not inherently associated with the first. It’s not safe to assume that those who care about the first meaning also care about the second. It is possible to be proud of one’s heritage without being proud of slavery. It’s futile to tell an entire region that their entire heritage is crap because of one prominent blemish. ...

Yeah, so I hesitated for about half a second before pointing to NationStates. Now you, too, can run your own country with whatever policies and attitudes you like. On my first day as ruler of the Free Land of Velodrome (original), I was faced with an animal rights issue: “The increasingly militant Animal Liberation Front struck again last night, freeing dozens of chickens bound for delicious snack packs.” I had to agree with Billy-Bob Longfellow, who said “These nuts have got to be stopped. They need to face the fact people want snack packs, no matter how many innocent chickens must be sacrificed. Besides, chickens would do the same to us if they had the chance.” Sure, my economist argued that we should just tax meat-eating, but I’m not a tax and spend kind of a guy. ...

[Charlie Stross](http://web.archive.org/web/20190222120932/http://web.archive.org/web/20190222120932/http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi/ (original)/) (original) and Cory Doctorow collaborated on a short story entitled “Jury Service,” which has been serialized on SciFi.com. The whole story is up now. Fun reading for geeks. Not entirely deep, though; I’d kind of have to classify it as what eluki bes shahar calls phatic text. I.e., it’s very comforting fiction. To a certain class of extropian geek, reading this is like drinking a glass of warm milk. The story is in service of the extrapolation: Huw is secondary to the cool transhuman technology. I am, alas, not compelled by Huw — I’m compelled by what happened to him. ...

British Pathe (original) has put all their old newsreels online. You can download lowres versions for free; they sell higher res versions as well. Kind of a cool glimpse into the world of British newsreels. I really like the Lucky Dip feature, which displays the info for 20 random clips.

According to the Washington Post, the CIA is torturing prisoners in Afghanistan. The best quote from the article: “‘If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job,’ said one official who has supervised the capture and transfer of accused terrorists.” Fun stuff. Reportedly, the CIA has also turned prisoners over to various countries for interrogation, including Syria. Last time I looked, Syria was not near the top of our friendly powers list. ...