The U.S. government is, of course, unhappy about naming the 9/11-related detainees. 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.)
Population: One
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.
Prosecutors in related cases have argued that the venues sell items associated with rave drug culture. Glow sticks. But glow sticks don’t cause drug use, nor are they drug paraphenalia. Both drugs and glow sticks are part of rave culture. What’s next — going after clothing stores that sell rave fashion?
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.
Just when the news stories about Russian mobs and the NHL were starting to die down, it looks like the Russians are picking on another winter sport: ice skating. The idea of international gangsters fixing Olympic figure skating tickles me pink in a weird way. Eventually, someone’s going to say “Hey, wait… if they could own hockey players and figure skaters, where the hell else are they?”
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).
Of course, one still assumes that we would become distressed if England sent SAS into the US to take down IRA leaders living over here. Our leadership continues to neglect the acid test: would we mind if someone else did that to us?
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.
Bloodhag is a Seattle speed metal band whose songs are all about science fiction authors. There are MP3s. I can’t possibly embellish on that.
Some of you may recall the Web-based puzzle game designed to promote Spielberg’s A.I. Pretty cool stuff, made cooler for me by the involvement of Sean Stewart. Anyhow, that game has defined an entire genre of alternate reality games and associated websites.
The community is pretty interesting. I particularly liked this writeup of a talk given by one of the authors of the A.I. game.
And Larry Niven thought you’d need teleportation to get flash crowds. The Washington Post ran an article about the crowd dynamic created by cell phones. Yet another example of the information revolution hitting us in ways we don’t expect.
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. (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.