While I’m on the subject, Judge Kessler’s decision is now available from FindLaw. It’s a PDF document. It warms my heart: “Difficult times such as these have always tested our fidelity to the core democratic values of openness, government accountability, and the rule of law. The Court fully understands and appreciates that the first priority of the executive branch in a time of crisis is to ensure the physical security of its citizens. By the same token, the first priority of the judicial branch must be to ensure that our Government always operates within the statutory and constitutional constraints which distinguish a democracy from a dictatorship.” ...

The U.S. government is, of course, unhappy about naming the 9/11-related detainees (original). For some reason, admitting who’s been arrested would impair the course of justice. This sort of thing has been a habit for the government this week. (Previous post on this subject here.)

It must be Joe Biden’s (D-Del) week for attacking civil liberties. This time round, he’s sponsoring a bill that would criminalize raves. It’s already a felony to knowingly house and profit from a drug enterprise; OK, I have no real issues with that other than my general feelings about the War on Drugs (which are negative). However, extending that law to cover people who throw raves seems sketchy — yes, there are going to be drugs at raves. But there have also been drugs at every rock concert I’ve ever been to in my life. You can’t hold promoters responsible for drug use in the culture; they didn’t create the culture. ...

I caught a late show of Signs on Friday night. Non-spoiler review: brilliant from a technical standpoint, but lacking in storytelling acumen. There are spoilers in what follows.

Time to go to the the assassination strategy, apparently. Rumsfeld has reportedly given the U.S. Special Ops command direct orders to go after the top leadership of al Qaeda, under their own guidance rather than under the authority of Central Command. It makes a sort of sense, for a country traumatized by civilian deaths; now is probably the best time to switch to an assassination strategy, because we’re so aware of collateral damage (and are finding out that we inflict quite a bit ourselves). ...

Judge Gladys Kessler just ruled that the federal government must release the names of everyone who’s been arrested and detained in the course of the September 11th investigations. I can’t find the decision itself online, but I’ll keep an eye out for it.

Some of you may recall the Web-based puzzle game (original) designed to promote Spielberg’s A.I. Pretty cool stuff, made cooler for me by the involvement of Sean Stewart (original). Anyhow, that game has defined an entire genre of alternate reality games (original) and associated websites (original). The community is pretty interesting. I particularly liked this writeup of a talk given by one of the authors of the A.I. game.

So this I just don’t get. Say you’re John Ashcroft, and you come up with a plan to do such and such. You properly sponsor a bill to allow the appropriate federal department to carry out that plan (among other plans; it’s a big bill). The House takes a look at the legislation and modifies the portion of it dealing with your clever plan. They feel you should not carry out your plan. ...

I’m not a huge Salon fan, but they have the occasional strong article. Today, there’s a very good discussion of the Left Behind series (original). (If you haven’t seen them, they’re the Christian apocalyptic series of books which is selling like hotcakes.) The article is a good primer on the nature of the books, and is pretty fair. It doesn’t mention that the Left Behind comic books are the best selling comic books in the US right now, but I’ll go ahead and mention it for them. It’s more important, and more interesting, to discuss the author’s connection to conservative politics without making too much of it, and the article does that.

This quote from Grant Morrison also seems tremendously relevant: “I finally figured out what my agenda is with The Invisibles, and with the superhero stuff as well. Within a year, we’ll see man’s first contact with a fictional reality. That’s what the magic’s all about. Fiction and reality are going to become interchangeable. It will happen very slowly, but the first thing I’m going to try and do is change places with King Mob. I’ll be in the comic, and he’ll come out the comic. It’s a technology; one of the things we can do with the comics universe is go into it. I realise now you can go into any comic or any piece of fiction wearing a Fiction Suit. This is pioneering stuff, we are now astronauts entering fiction as a dimension. I can go into the comics world wearing a Superman body amd walk around and tell them stuff like what’s going to happen on page sixteen if I want. I thought, what if yuo treated that reality as being its own real autonomous world? In the same way that those hyperbeings could get me out, can I get anyone out of there?” ...