Link: http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.html

It's called Gender Genie and contains an algorithm designed to determine if a block of text was written by a woman or a man. As a quick experiment, I fed one of my blog postings to Gender Genie and this is what it reported:

Words: 356
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 384
Male Score: 466

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

So...a score of 1 for 1. 100%! Clearly an utterly infallible tool...

Link: http://accordionguy.blogware.com/Photos/2005/11/america-a_brief_parable.jpg

I knew it would come from a satirist...

Link: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/1/5/141347/9724

....they would probably not believe you...read this and weep. The guy appears to have done everything in his power to get arrested...only to discover that the "outstanding warrant" was a clerical error from...irony of ironies...1984.
What really worries me about this whole incident (leaving aside the reality that since all bureaucratic systems contain errors, other folks are likely to encounter the same problem in the future), is that any sensible terrorist organization is not going to utilize any individual who is not "squeaky clean", since even a traffic ticket could lead to that individual being caught in an enforcement or investigative dragnet. If there are any "real" terrorists in the USA right now, I am pretty sure that they do not appear in any list of infractions anywhere, which means that these sort of cross-departmental information exchanges will prove to be ineffective at preventing terrorist attacks. Which leads me to my tentative conclusion from living in the UK (where the IRA operated in the past): you cannot hope to prevent operating terrorists from committing an outrage, because in order to do so, law enforcement and intelligence has to be right 100% of the time. The terrorists only have to do something right once. The proper solution is to address the underlying causes of terrorism. However, that is difficult to do when those causes cannot be fixed in a single election cycle (they can't, usually because the causes were a long time in the making).
This sort of bureaucratically-based investigation is not a cost-effective or useful way of preventing any sort of terrorist activity. Using a metaphor, people need to stop clinging to these sorts of life-rafts, and start looking at root causes and how to address them. That requires electors to start asking awkward questions of their elected representatives along the lines of "what is the strategy?" and "why are you authorising the expenditure of money on getting people to take their shoes off in airports?". Until the electorate starts demanding proper strategic actions from politicians, instead of "look! we did something" knee-jerk tactics, cross-checking drivers license renewals has nothing to do with prevention of terrorism.

Link: http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20061215.html

An excellent article on Findlaw from John Dean which explains why any attempt to impeach the current President or Vice-President is unlikely to be successful...so the investigation process needs to focus on lower-level officials, who can also be impeached.

Link: http://secondlife.com/whatis/

...then it might be too much to expect that you would want to spend any time at this web location. However, if your first life is extremely tedious or unrewarding, perhaps this might be just the place to hang out...

Link: http://jassalasca.blogspot.com/

...by Jassalasca Jape, after the style of Ambrose Bierce, with a little Mark Twain, HL Menckem and (perhaps) Bill Hicks...

Link: http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2003/02/we_268_01.html

...where. among other things, he eviscerates the Total Information Awareness project.

Link: http://www.planetjh.com/davis/davis_2005_07_27.html

...from last year, with all sorts of interesting insights, including how he met the Grateful Dead, reflections on parenthood (he has three stunningly beautiful daughters), polyamory, why he left the cattle ranching business, how he gradually fell out with Dick Cheney (Barlow actually helped to get Cheney elected in 1978),and why he is not a Republican but needs the Democrats to grow a spine (hear, hear).

Link: http://gadfly.igc.org/index.htm

...is a web site that I have only just stumbled upon, with some penetrating critiques on a variety of subjects. Authoritarians and theocrats beware...many of The Social Gadfly's opinions may prove somewhat indigestible...

Link: http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2006/12/18/suskind_empiricism.html#comments

...about the subtle but very important difference between the words realism and reality. The latter word became notorious after the 2004 elections when it was recast as part of the phrase "reality-based community" used by many progressive bloggers. Realism is a word that has taken root since the publication of the ISG report, because of the perception that many of the people involved in the report's creation are foreign policy realists - a currently attractive contrast to the Neo-Conservatives, who are currently suffering a credibility problem since more and more people realized that Iraq has become a quagmire.
At the heart of the problem is that the Bush administration has been tripped up by its own foreign policy hubris. Whichever way you dress up the verbiage, the current mess in Iraq was not difficult to predict- except that all contrary views were ignored, marginalized, abused and otherwise buried in the aftermath of 9/11.
Once again, the mainstream media are partially culpable due to their habit of uncritically repeating administration talking points, and the continuing presence on the airwaves of numerous political commentators whose credibility and those of the broadcast networks are so intertwined that both they and the networks have identical current objectives. Those objectives are to maintain some perception of credibility at all costs.
We are seeing many of those commentators continue to either perpetuate the same thought processes that got the USA into a mess in Iraq (including the continued repetition of implausible memes such as "Democrats are weak on national security"), or to change position while denying that any position change has really occurred (using classic techniques such as obfuscation, doublespeak, and reliance on general amnesia in the population).
I have little respect for people who never admit to error. The mainstream media's credibility for me continues to hover somewhere between zero and squat. Their entire process for reporting on what is going on in the world today is broken, yet they either have not noticed this, or they are unable to face the changes that will be necessary to improve it.