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Chris Hedges on war. The long-time war correspondent explains why it will be years before we have any idea what's been going on in Iraq, and describes the gulf between here and there:

One of the Marines in the book returns to California and is invited to be the guest of honor in a gated community in Malibu, a place where he could never afford to live. The residents want to toast him as a war hero. "I'm not a hero," he tells the guests. "Guys like me are just a necessary part of things. To maintain this way of life in a fine community like this, you need psychos like us to go out and drop a bomb on somebody's house."

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Jeopardy Going After Kottke. Jason Kottke has served as the web's source of news about Ken Jennings and Jeopardy, with his most-linked blog entries being his September report of Jennings' impending loss and his Sunday provision of the actual audio of Kennings' loss. Now Sony is taking legal action against him for his spoilers, and this makes him very sad.
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Canadian authorities have arrested US President George W. Bush and charged him with offences under Canada's War Crimes Act. Says (Canadian Prime Minister) Paul Martin: “This decision was not made lightly. But, it was also a decision that was impossible not to make. The United States is not outside the rule of law, and cannot expect to get an unlimited “free pass”. This decision puts a grave strain upon both our nations, and I urge calm and restraint from our American neighbours, as well as from Canadians. I have met with the cabinet, and with our colleagues in the House. This is a time of great crisis for us as a nation. But as people, we will survive this test. Earlier I enacted the Emergency War Powers Act. This is necessary to guarantee our domestic security. This is not a time for panic, for lawlessness, for anything other than a responsible and sobre focus on what lies immediately ahead.”
comment posted at 4:07 PM on Nov-29-04

Tin Foil hat time! Here is the letter that Sibel D. Edmonds and 24 other former federal employees signed and are prepared to tell all to a grand jury. 24 - that sounds like a TV title. Or a group of people who've seen something that concerns them. 24 more than the last time the blue talked about Mr. Edmonds. Now go scooby out the truth you meta-filter sleuths!
comment posted at 1:09 PM on Nov-29-04

Haruki Murakami is one of Japan's most widely translated authors, yet he still answers his readers emails. He has compared the process of writing to simultaneously designing and playing a video game. He is sometimes dismissed as a pop-writer, but the fifty-something's life and works have already garnered him a critical autobiography. He has investigated and written about the Aum Shinrikyo sarin attacks for his book, Underground. His novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, transcends elements of both cyberpunk and detective fiction through a combination of surreal allegory and an almost stoic immediacy. It all begins with the impossibly slow ascent of an elevator.
comment posted at 5:46 PM on Nov-28-04

A team of Korean scientists have enabled a woman who has not been able to stand up for the last 19 years due to a spinal cord injury to walk on her own (103 MB .wmv), thanks to a transplant of stem cells from umbilical cord blood. [Via Future Hi.]
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I know we're all contemplating leftovers today, so I thought some food safety music would be appropriate. Dr. Carl Winter's website includes lyrics, video clips, and streaming audio of such songs as "A Case of Norwalk", "Don't Get Sicky Wit It", "I Sprayed It On The Grapevine", and "Beware La Vaca Loca."
comment posted at 10:25 PM on Nov-26-04

Apparently, the reports of our leader's pictures being taken down around the country aren't true. WTF???
comment posted at 4:44 PM on Nov-24-04

What the Bleep Do We Know? Has anybody else seen this movie, about quantum physics and the nature of reality? We went to see it last night and were flummoxed by the 100-person line sprawling up the sidewalk outside our little downtown art theater. The movie was good, but for the most part didn't cover anything I hadn't heard or thought about before. Except for the work of Dr. Masaru Emoto, whose experiments seem to prove that ice crystals form in different shapes depending on the mood that the water is subjected to. As somebody with only the most introductory familiarity with quantum physics, I'm curious to know from people who've spent more time around the subject: What do you think (of the theory, and of the movie if you've seen it)?
comment posted at 10:37 PM on Nov-23-04

From cells to bells, 10 things the Chinese do far better than we do Ah, those clever Chinese. First they invent gunpowder and a few other essentials of modern civilization. Now they're gunning their economic engines. Yet who would have thought that, after a millennium of poverty, they'd already do so many things better than we? In fact, compiling a Top 10 list of what China does better than Canada isn't easy. There are so many items. To whittle it down, let's assume it's unfair to count anything related to cheap labour. So we won't include the wonderfully thorough mop-ups of supermarket spills: The staff don't plunk down those yellow you-can't-sue-us caution signs. They actually fan the floor with a broken sheet of Styrofoam until it is dry. Nor will we mention the exquisite, free head-and-shoulder massages that come with every shampoo and haircut....
comment posted at 10:07 PM on Nov-23-04

George "Don't mess with my homies" Bush. So, evidently, our president got in a scuffle. Yes, a scuffle.
comment posted at 1:01 PM on Nov-22-04

Llamas (including, but not limited to, images of llamas on stamps (regular and unusual), musical instruments, postcards, paintings, jewelry, fabric, signs, advertisements, view-master slides, pottery, trading cards, crests, Christmas decorations, stereoviews, puzzles, currency, pins, logos, toys, misc., and much more).
NOTE: "They are not for sale, they are simply for your entertainment."
comment posted at 2:46 AM on Nov-21-04

Song meanings is a site where you can read the lyrics to a song and then post your thoughts on what the song means.
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The European Union is the world's largest superpower: of course, militarily the US is still dominates, but this article (Salon day pass required) argues that in terms of economy, personal freedom, the welfare of its citizens and human rights the EU is far and away number one. Via DailyKos.
comment posted at 5:13 PM on Nov-18-04

House Republicans Change Rules to Protect DeLay
"On a voice vote, the House Republican Conference changed a rule that required party leaders to step down if indicted for any crime that carries a prison sentence of two or more years."
comment posted at 10:49 PM on Nov-17-04

Oh crap. Rumours are starting to emerge that following the death of his favourite consort Kim Jong-Il has retreated into virtual seclusion allowing the the military to take over in a defacto coup.
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TODAY WE ARE BECOME GORDON FREEMAN. This is the best of the web if e'er there was one. Go play.
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Dollar's Decline Is Reverberating All this talk about blue state, red state. How's the state of the one thing we all think about equally in common coming along? Isn't it time for a serious, non-partisan, "morally" neutral dialogue on the state of the US economy?
comment posted at 3:23 AM on Nov-16-04

It hasn't been a good day for the Bill of Rights. In addition to this and this, it's now apparently a breach of security to take pictures of the White House from a public street. And to resell diaries of historical importance. [reg may be required.]
comment posted at 10:31 PM on Nov-15-04

Fallujah in pictures. Graphic images of destruction and loss.
comment posted at 9:53 PM on Nov-15-04

OMG! ODB DOA. WTF?
comment posted at 7:22 PM on Nov-13-04

The Final Hours of Half-Life 2: A fascinating look at the development hell that HL2 went through in the last year and a half. (via, of course, PA)
comment posted at 6:18 PM on Nov-13-04

“The real glory of war is surviving.” One of Hollywood's biggest crimes of the last quarter-century is being set right this week with the release of "The Big Red One: The Reconstruction", a beautifully restored version of Samuel Fuller's butchered 1980 masterpiece. The stunning new version restores some 15 scenes and more than 40 minutes of footage to Fuller's grittily autobiographical film about his World War II stint as a GI with the Army's First Infantry Division. Filmed in Israel, the film stars Lee Marvin in his greatest performance. The cut version of the film flopped, and Fuller went to his grave in 1997 bemoaning the fate of "The Big Red One," telling every journalist he met that he dreamed of seeing his original vision up on the big screen. Richard Schickel, critic and documentary filmmaker, printed 70,000 feet of film from negatives stored in a vault in Kansas City and supervised the editing according to Fuller's original shooting script. "What they released in 1980 wasn't a bad movie," Schickel said. "What the studio wanted was a gung-ho war movie. What we've added is the real Sam stuff: the boredom, the absurdity of an ordinary soldier caught up in a vast war". More inside.
comment posted at 5:47 AM on Nov-13-04

Green and Libertarian Presidential Candidates to Demand Ohio Recount. David Cobb and Michael Badnarik, the 2004 presidential candidates for the Green and Libertarian parties, today announced their intentions to file a formal demand for a recount of the presidential ballots cast in Ohio.
comment posted at 6:31 AM on Nov-12-04

Science experiment: one bottle of vile, cheap vodka and a Brita water filter. Four filtrations later and it tastes better than Ketel One.
comment posted at 10:05 PM on Nov-10-04

Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released today. Servers are reportedly being hit hard so you might want to try a bittorrent download. Comments from: The BBC, PC World, InformationWeek and a very good article from The Boston Globe. Users needing support should check out the Mozillazine Support Forums.
comment posted at 4:46 PM on Nov-9-04

The Writings of Charles Darwin on the Web. Thanks to the British Library.
comment posted at 1:25 PM on Nov-9-04

Robert J. Vanderbei is trying to show us we're not as divided as it seems.
It's not quite the City Vs. Country conflict that you may have understood it to be in this years election. Methinks, perhaps, this extends to other political opinions as well.

Lots of great voting result visualizations are available at this blog. Including my favorite, state results, with electoral votes dictating the relative size of the state. I'm not explaining it well. Go look here.

I *promise* this'll be the last political post for a while. I know we're all wretchedly sick of it.
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Two Americas, but not the ones you might have thought. Apologies for perpetuating ElectionFilter, but this page has, in addition to all the blue/red/purple maps we've seen, a bar graph at the bottom of the page that I find fascinating. To quote the authors, "It appears that there are, as the pundits have been telling us, 'two Americas,' but they are not the ones people usually talk about. They are 'divided America,' where people split roughly evenly between Republican and Democrat, and 'decided America,' where everyone is a Democrat. " (via Crooked Timber)
comment posted at 9:59 PM on Nov-7-04

Google Blocks Abu Ghraib Images
I went to Google Images to search for it. "Abu Ghraib" brought up only photos of the outside of the prison. Not a single photo from the scandal. Next I searched for "Lynndie England", not a single picture. Next I decided to look for "Charles Graner" her boyfriend who was also prominently features in the pictures, nothing.
See for yourself.
comment posted at 10:32 PM on Nov-6-04

Southern Conservativism explained from the inside. "I get very antsy when I see this entire election outcome being blamed on radical conservatism or on ignorance or stupidity. Because really when people talk about "radical" conservativism, what they really mean is Southern conservativism, specifically the kind that originated in the Southern Baptist church in the late 70's/early 80's. And that makes me unhappy. I am an ex-Southern conservative." An interesting read coming out of the election fallout.
comment posted at 5:23 PM on Nov-6-04

The Lancet recently claimed that up to 100,000 Iraqi civilians are dead as a result of the war. Believable or not?
comment posted at 5:32 PM on Nov-6-04

Brave Woman I bring to you via Monkeyfilter
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Ever wonder how the world is going to hell in a handbasket if gay marriage runs amok? Our own digaman recounts his ceremony from a couple years ago, after being together with someone for ten years. Sounds like every other wedding I've ever been to (except for the lack of bridesmaids). I'm always telling family members that don't have gay friends like I do: don't fear them, I assure you they're just as boring as you and I.
comment posted at 10:27 PM on Nov-5-04