Posts

Bruce Rolston writes about Fallujah: Comic Book Guy jokes aside, this could well be a brilliant move on the Marines' part, but only if you ascribe to one key assumption ... that the resistance in Fallujah is largely non-political, tribal, and localist, as we've argued here all along. Then it's brilliant. It gives the tribesmen still fighting the Marines an exit strategy and enough of a victory to go home with, while isolating any remaining foreign/diehard nationalist elements, whose numbers are, I've been arguing, probably pretty minimal, from their covering population. Now, if you believe there's an actual coordinated nationalist, reactionary, Sunni-based resistance in Fallujah, one sponsored and aided by foreigners to boot, it's insane. The argument that the resistance in Fallujah was as Rolston argues that it is always made the most sense to me. It’s worth remembering that we got off to a bad start in Fallujah as soon as the occupation began, when a bunch of civilians were killed by US troops after a demonstration got out of hand. ...

LawGeek points out that Apple has changed the licensing terms for tracks purchased from the iTunes Music Store, reducing the number of times the same playlist can be be burned to CD, and has added code to detect trivially different playlists and include them in the count as well. This doesn’t really affect me, but it underscores a larger point, which is that when you purchase copyrighted material protected by DRM, you submit to the whims of the DRM provider, and usually the terms can be changed without your having any say in it at all. That’s why I hate DRM – it changes what the term “ownership” means fundamentally. ...

So it looks like we’re turning Fallujah over to a former Iraqi general who was governor of Anbar province (where Fallujah is located) and was former military adviser to Chemical Ali. When we said we were letting former Baath party members start working with the new government, I thought we meant school teachers, postmen, and other such people. I didn’t know we meant Baath party insiders like General Salah. It sounds to me like we’re turning security in Fallujah over to the insurgents for all intents and purposes. Maybe it will work out better than what we’ve tried out up til now. It bears close watching in any case. One risk that Christopher Albritton doesn’t point out is that the new force may very well keep Fallujah secure and quiet, but at the same time let it remain a haven for insurgents, terrorists, and other anti-occupation types, basically letting them do what they wish as long as they don’t make trouble in Fallujah proper. ...

The retro eyeglass frames I’ve long dreamed of possessing, which I now know are called Clubman Art-Rims, have been discontinued. That’s a bummer.

I was a bit shocked to read the following at Cafe au Lait today: On the other hand I've yet to figure out why Apple expects me to pay $0.99 for songs that can be downloaded for free from many other places. Perhaps Steve Jobs took too many engineering classes and too few classes in economics. The odd thing was that this wasn’t written by a high schooler who has no money outside his allowance but rather by a computer book author who makes what one would assume is a decent sized chunk of his income by selling copyrighted works. When it comes to other people’s creative work, it seems like Eliotte Rusty Harold’s basic ethical code consists of, “Why should I pay for something I can steal?” ...

The Christian Science Monitor has an excellent profile of Moqtada al-Sadr today. It concludes by pointing out that al-Sadr’s main fight is with the mainstream Shiite leadership rather than the United States, further underscoring Richard Clarke’s argument this weekend that the real war being waged is an internecine battle within Islam rather than a battle between the west and Islam. (Not that I think that al-Sadr’s movement is in league with Salafist movements like al-Qaeda but rather that they are both factions opposed to moderation.) ...

Apparently Wesley Clark has had it with the proxy war being waged on John Kerry’s military record by Karen Hughes, Dick Cheney, and others (on behalf of the President, who certainly doesn’t have the guts to smear Kerry himself on this issue).

The Army has requested that two ski resorts that had leased 105mm howitzers for avalanche control purposes return the guns so that they can be shipped overseas to use in Iraq or Afghanistan. This article is interesting to me because I would have never thought that at this point, we’d be suffering from a shortage of artillery in Iraq or Afghanistan. You don’t need artillery for peacekeeping. (I’m assuming the Army isn’t going to use the guns for avalanche control in the Hindu Kush.) ...

Is there a better example of a bikeshed discussion than the design of a new national flag?

One popular security question used to confirm the identity of a person making a request is, “What is your mother’s maiden name?” Well Brad Graham points out that using Google, you can find that information for many people on genealogy sites. He discusses this in the context of retrieving other people’s passwords to their Gmail accounts, but it’s just as true for your credit card or anything else. The Gmail case is particularly egregious because you generally don’t tell other people your credit card numbers, but you do tell them your email address. ...