Centrist liberal Milblogger (yeah, there are some) Alexander the Average has done a lot of good stuff. His 2-part set of posts exploring the aftermath of nuclear terrorism is highly recommended.

Some MemeStreamers will find this up their alley. I'm memeing a blog posting of this series because its two parts and they've provided one convenient permalink for it.

Winds of Change.NET: Exploring the Impact of Nuclear Terrorism

The Darfur conflict is an ongoing conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan, mainly between the Janjaweed, a government-supported militia recruited from local Arab tribes, and the non-Arab peoples of the region. Note that both sides are largely black in skin tone, and the distinction between "Arab" and "non-Arab" common in western media is heavily disputed by many people, including the Sudanese government. The conflict has been widely described as "ethnic cleansing", and frequently as "genocide".

As I surfed the poliblogosphere one meme that seemed to be common on right and left blogs was Darfur. Both political groups are covering the issue and seemed concerned at the lack of MSM coverage or attention from the Administration. Ironically, Bush called the Darfur situation genocide today, apparently after not mentioning the issue for 3 months.

Darfur conflict - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This started as a response to someone who told me that Atlanta was cool as long as you stay north. Well thats fascist bullshit. Cause all the good bars are south of ponce (sopo). Here's the Jollarian Bar Guide for Lefties in Atlanta:

I highly endorse this bar list. There are a few I'd add, and a few on here I haven't been to. I'd also drop the leftie designation having gotten drunk at the Yacht Club a few weeks ago with a decidedly Republican and his collection of birthday revelers.

Jollarian Bar Guide for Lefties in Atlanta

I don't think that most bloggers have consciously manipulative online personas, but I do think that it's become a "political team sport" on almost every issue.

Surfing the political blogosphere this evening. Thought this comment was particularly good. Click through to the note he is riffing off...

INDC Journal: Ditto

The Internet's primary oversight body approved a plan Wednesday to create a virtual red-light district, setting the stage for pornographic Web sites to use new addresses ending in "xxx"

Lauren Weinstein has observed that this may open pandora's box as conservative groups move to push content into this TLD and ban it. Legislatures will write laws requiring ISPs to block it, as well as requiring sites with certain content to be listed under it. Some sites which are clearly not porn sites but which have some content which may be inappropriate for children will be forced into this box under duress, and they'll fight back. And then there is the matter of interstate commerce. In sum, this is going to start a constitutional fireworks show.

Furthermore, I want to point out that ICANN is totally inept at choosing TLDs in general. I don't think that they should be allowed to do it. They have too much power to shape the internet, they are really not accountable to anyone, and they are terrible at it.

Consider .BIZ. Self respecting people do business, not "bizzzzzz." Bizzzz is what people who fence stolen goods do. No one uses that tld.

.XXX is simply a bad choice for a domain name. They should have used .SEX. XXX implies hard core porn. SEX is far more likely to be acceptable to a wider range of websites and I think would result in fewer legal battles. For example, sites about sex education would love to be listed under .sex, but would refuse to be classified as XXX. However, the conservative christians will want them clumped into the red light district so they can block them more easily, and so the fireworks...

Not to mention that .KIDS, which I think is a great idea, and presents fewer legal difficulties, is still considered a bad idea by ICANN. Obviously some people might have different opinions about content that is appropriate for the .kids tld, but the issue is likely to be less contentious as no one will be forced into the domain.

I actually considered applying for a position at ICANN, but I am not Joi Ito. Yet.

CNN.com - Stage set for '.xxx' Internet addresses - Jun 2, 2005

What about making the recommend window sizeable (or, at least, bigger)?

We already have a bigger recommend window. I've stopped using the older, smaller one.

Keep up the good work.

-janelane

Thanks!

RE: MemeStreams Update: Death to bracket quotes!

IconoclasT wrote:
Just a thought but how about support for IMG tags?

I see a few problems with that. Tell me if you think I'm over reacting.

Most people don't have an image host, and will want one.
Image hosts will have various reliability/performance, resulting slow or unreliable MemeStreams page load times.
Linking images instead of rehosting them is considered impolite. Recently Arianna Huffington linked an image off of redstate on her blog, so they modified it with a nasty message for her about creaming them with traffic.
People may decide to link commercial images. Linked sites will obviously know their images are being used on MemeStreams based on their logs. This may result in a lawyer nastygram.

I think it would be better to host images here. I have a near term plan to do that.

RE: MemeStreams Update: Death to bracket quotes!

Rattle wrote:
My 1Ghz G4 Powerbook's performance has really taken a dive since installing Tiger. I'm wondering if anyone else is having similar problems...

Yes, I agree. I wish I had not upgraded. They broke Cisco VPN, Tivo Desktop, and lowered performance a lot. Nothing new has been worth it.

I have one gig of ram, yet regularly my system is having to pull applications out of swap in situations where I'm not pushing it hard and never had a problem in the past.

Yup! It has the same feel as my Windows machine.

Dashboard flat out sucks.

I haven't looked at it in weeks. Its a neat toy, but damn is it expensive, and there is no way to shut it off. There is no GUI method for deleting widgets.

Ok, I like Spotlight...

Haven't touched it. Locatedb anyone? Find?

Safari seems to eat more ram with every update. I'm used to unloading it and re-loading it every so often to alleviate its fat, but that has not been necessary recently because it seems to be crashing more. Mail has been crashing regularly as well.

Safari does seem slow. I think it might be the RSS feeds. I should be able to tell it to stop collecting that data. Instead the only way to turn that off is to remove all the feeds from your bookmarks. I just set the article hold time to one day. I haven't, however, experienced any crashes. Neither Mail nor Safari have died if memory serves.

RE: Tiger not all that great...

Why is the Department of Homeland Security involved in copyright issues?

Mission Creep, and the self perpetuating nature of government.

Schneier on Security: DHS Enforces Copyright

The system of bracket quotations has been killed. I have cut the site over to using blockquote tags, and the italics that were popular early in the history of the site.

Text enclosed in "blockquote" tags, or "bq" for short, look like this!

I have not, and won't convert all of the old posts in the system. Such a process is fraught with peril. Going forward, things will look nicer. In a few weeks you won't even recall the old quoting system.

As always, let us know if there are any problems.