I commend to you a moving essay by Britt Blaser at Escapable Logic.
I don't know if I agree that “At our nation's birth, most voters were smarter, tougher, better educated and more patriotic than you and me” — that's edging a little in the Straussian direction for my taste — but it's a fine, heartfelt essay about war, heroics, politics, and the next election nonetheless.
Phil Carter reports that:
The Center for Public Integrity has obtained a series of previously classified documents from Rolling Stone writer Osha Gray Davidson surrounding the abuse investigations at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Most of the documents are appendices to the various investigative reports that have been done, such as sworn statements from BG Janis Karpinski's aide-de-camp and a high-ranking JAG officer at the prison, as well as an Army CID report documenting some of the worst abuses there. Together, these reports paint a picture of abuse far worse than what was originally reported.
(emphasis added)
I'm not sure I can bear to look.
Brad DeLong summarizes the first week in October over at the Shrillblog.
It's not pretty, all that shrillness in one place. What happens if it escapes?
GMail has been down for the past two hours. Occasionally I can get an email list, once in a while an email from the inbox, but never any that I've filed in a folder.
UM still can't provide me with reliable mail service…the email server went down last week for a while and no one knows why. I fear I will have to roll my own on the server that runs the blog. Do I wait for Dreamhost to finish beta-testing spamassasin? Install and configure my own? I have better things to do, darn it.
The Gadflyer explains Why Sally Foster is evil.
(The dread name “Sally Foster” won't mean much to you if you don't have school-age kids, or if you live in a country that adequately funds its schools, so just skip it.)
I mean, I knew Sally Foster was evil: it's overpriced gift wrap, albeit of good quality. Their MLM-style marketing campaign promises kids “rewards” like TVs if they sell several hundred dollars of Sally Foster junk to their parents' friends. From which I conclude that there's lots of money not going to the school but into Sally's pocket.
But. But. Lately of The Carlyle Group???
I've added an experimental comments feed suitable for the RSS blogreading tool of your choice. Comments recursively welcomed.
If this works I suppose I'll XML but I don't think there's an obvious way to make the comments feed do that, so the comments feed will lag somewhat.
Generally, I've been finding the blog is getting slower as the database grows. Some updates, and especially attempts to use MT-Blacklist to kill large amounts of spam, cause timeout errors when I exceed some limit set by my host…a limit they won't increase unless I get a box of my own, which would raise my costs tenfold. I gather this slowdown is a known MT 2.6.x behavior. For now I intend to live with it. In the fullness of time some sort of major upgrade or migration may be in order. In my copious spare time. Ha.
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