Cool fundraising: Sixteen noted authors will auction the right to have your name (or in some cases the name of a willing designate) be affixed to a minor character, a storefront, or otherwise appear in an upcoming novel. All proceeds benefit the First Amendment Project. (via Copyfight).
I love Neil Gaiman, but all in all do I want my name on a fictional tombstone? Probably not.
The Carpetbagger carps,
How ‘free’ will our ‘Freedom Walk’ be? There are any number of reasons to find the upcoming “America Supports You Freedom Walk” disconcerting. This is an event, organized by Rumsfeld’s Defense Department, which will honor the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks with a “freedom walk” from the Pentagon’s parking lot, past Arlington National Cemetery, to the reflecting pool on the National Mall. …
Some have said that this is ham-fisted nationalism gone awry. Others have noted the distastefulness of exploiting the attacks like this. Salon mentioned the less-than-subtle effort to connect 9/11 to Iraq. ….
But here’s the part that caught my attention: to participate in the “Freedom Walk,” you’ll need to register with the Department of Defense. …
That’s right, in order to participate in a government-sponsored “Freedom Walk” on public streets past public monuments, from one outdoor public landmark to another, you have to give your name address, phone number, and email address to the Pentagon.
Double plus ungood.
In “The Strategy of Conflict” ur-game theorist Thomas Schelling discusses a special type of coordination, which he illustrates [I’m working from memory here, so forgive me if I slur details] with the following example:
Suppose you find yourself in New York city, and you have to meet a stranger. You have no way of communicating with them, but you know that they too want to meet you. Where and when do you go?
Apparently, someone did a study and found that a substantial majority of New Yorkers (in the 1950s) answered, ‘under the clock in Grand Central Station at noon’ — this being the stereotypical meeting place and time for Manhattanites. And, being the most common answer, it was therefore also the right one.
For a while there, it looked as if Meetup was going to be the Grand Central Station clock of the Internet — the default place to look for like-minded strangers. Then economics reared its head: Meetup, which was free and no doubt burning funds at a prodigious rate, decided to start charging for Meetups.
Naturally, meetings are fleeing to the free services. For example, the other day I saw this announcement via The Blogging of the President from the Dean for America campaign:
DFA-Link: DFA is finally moving away from using Meetup.com and has created DFA-Link, its own online organizing tools for local meetings, etc. Please sign up at DFA Link. After August 31, DFA will no longer be using Meetup.com for events or communicating with members.
That same day I got an email promoting a free version called Gatheroo, and promising that it “will not charge”:
Information technologies have been blamed for (among many things) increasing alienation (e.g., game potatoes). The Meetup phenomena moved in the opposite direction – using technologies to bring folks together and thus reversing if not a trend, a perception. … we feel technologies like ours are a response. I have expanded on this in our blog
As I’ve written previously (see Building the Bottom Up from the Top Down), I agree that meetup-style services are of great potential value and importance. The problem is that while there was one, famous, meetup.com, there are at present many free alternatives, with no one service seeming likely to achieve dominance. But this game is non-constant-sum: unless some player can evolve a dominant strategy — or someone can design a crawler/aggregator that combines them all into one feed — we are poorer for it.
Via JURIST – Paper Chase: Judge orders Canada to stop questioning Gitmo teen:
A Canadian Federal Court judge has ruled that intelligence authorities must stop interrogating Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive] detainee Omar Khadr [CBC Khadr family profile]. Justice Konrad von Finckenstein’s decision also slammed Canadian counterterrorism agents for gathering information at a place where he claims Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms [text] has been violated. Khadr has admitted killing a US medic [JURIST report] while fighting with the Taliban. He was captured when he was 15 years old and transferred to Guantanamo Bay after turning 16. The US never clarified Khadr’s legal status or charged him but agents from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service [official website] and the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade [official website] have interviewed him at Guantanamo at least three times. Von Finckenstein’s ruling prevents further interviews from occurring. The Globe and Mail has more.
This blog is hosted at dreamhost.com. On the whole I've been happy with its low prices, although as this blog grows I chafe more an more at the limits on processing times imposed by the virtual host controller on my shared machine. I am no longer able, for example, to kill off more than a few spams at a time via mt-blacklist; I can't rebuild the site without having a crash except on the dead of night on federal holidays. It can get frustrating. But it is cheap. And the real problem is that movable type and some of my favorite plugins are rather resource-intensive.
Nevertheless, I do find it a little worrying to see the management at DreamHost crowing about how easy it is to make money off folks like me. So much money that they are going to hire a bookkeeper.
PS. If you are looking for very cheap and on the whole reliable blog hosting, tell them “froomkin” sent you and I get a kickback.
We know that four-star generals — or indeed any general officers other than one female reservist who claims to be a scapegoat — do not get disciplined, much less cashiered, over little things like presiding over very substantial quantities of torture by their subordinates. (We used to claim to adhere to command responsibility, so one would have accepted responsibility to flow upwards, not curdle down at the level of NCOs.)
One could even be forgiven for thinking that if having your troops stringing prisoners up with mock electrodes or beating them to death in sleeping bags wasn't the sort of thing that got a general in trouble, nothing would.
Well, it seems there is something. Some unspecified “personal misconduct,” that can get a 4-Star General Dismissed.
What could it be? Fiddling the accounts, or sleeping with the wrong person perhaps. But not torture, even if he did run the Army Training and Doctrine Command. We don't go after ranking officers for that—got to save something for the war crimes tribunals.
Update: Yup. The Washington post reports that the great crime was “an extramarital affair with a civilian.”
I suppose, in all fairness, this hierarchy of military offenses is consistent with our impeachment priorities. That said, I do find this part of the Post story more offensive than sad,
The Army has been hurt over the past year by detainee-abuse cases and has been accused of not going after top officers allegedly involved in such abuse. Army officials said relieving Byrnes was meant to show the public that the service takes issues of integrity seriously.
“We all swear to serve by the highest ideals, and no matter what rank, when you violate them, you are dealt with appropriately,” said one Army officer familiar with the case.
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