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?” ...

Do I believe that one has the right to do whatever one wants to one’s body and mind? Yeah, “an it harm none.” (Credit: Aleister Crowley.) Kind of a bleak belief, though. Maybe more later, maybe not. Your Google search terms for the day are “pro ana” and soulbonding.

Not only do I dig typography, I dig the minute distinctions between various type families. Thus, I adore this discussion of twenty serif body text typefaces.

There’s a popular belief that the media is liberal. Interestingly, the media is apparently more likely to label a liberal politician as liberal than they are to label a conservative politician as conservative. Geoffery Nunberg did a study on this. It’s not clear to me that this proves anything; you could say that the qualifying adjective (in this case, liberal) only needs to be used when the subject noun is not mainstream. That’s kind of what Nunberg is saying. I don’t know if I believe it, though; you could also say that the liberal media is calling attention to the fact that politicians with admirable policies are liberal. ...

If sex is a bother to you, you might not want to read “…inexplicably fancy trash.” If good writing is a joy to you, you probably do want to read it. If both of these suppositions are true, you have a dilemma. Lucky you! It’s a Weblog, and more or less work-safe, but it’s the Weblog of an erotic writer… pornographer… guy who writes sexual stories. Uh. All the words are so charged, so connotative! There is a man (I think) who took on a pseudonym in order that he might safely write erotica. This is not the Weblog of the man, it is the Weblog of the pseudonym. There’s a lot of sex in it, thus. Also some politics. ...