A recent Spiked article has some interesting things to say about modern terrorist movements and their globalist, as opposed to nationalist, backgrounds. I don’t agree with the main thesis — that Western humanitarian intervention weakened the concept of state sovereignty so much that terrorist movements no longer have nationalist aims — because I don’t think the weakness of the state is a new thing. Internationalism has eroded state sovereignty for quite a long time, but a large part of the weaknesses of the state system are the same ones that it has had all along. (A reliance on national identity for legitimacy, for instance, makes it very hard to fill the entire world with brand-new states, which was the one of the effects of decolonization. Former colony space simply could not remain “empty” of states when the powers of the world were states themselves. After all, with whom do you set trade rules?) ...

I don’t watch Days of Our Lives most years. Soaps in general tend to be too repetitious for me. (That comment isn’t meant to be seen as a shot at the genre, which I appreciate. I have the same problem with police dramas, no matter how critically acclaimed.) The turmoil and strife among a group of familiar characters — trapped in a isolated setting and in a claustrophobic loop of repeating plotlines — just doesn’t hold my interest for more than a couple of episodes.

Every once in a while in the blog world, some mildly controversial topic will come along and kick up up a mini-storm of opinions. One of the latest is over Wikipedia, a project encouraging open participation in building an encyclopedia-like reference resource.

How contentious does an election have to be to make Garrison Keillor angry? I think we just found out. BTW, a wonderful example here of how Google AdSense can work in sublimely ridiculous ways. On each page of the In These Times site that I visited, there was an ad for “Republican Singles.” :)

Pretty site. Good sense. Browse Happy.

If dissent is unpatriotic, then apparently Senator Kennedy dissented his way all the way on to the no-fly list. (Of course, my first thought was that past legal troubles…ahem…might have something to do with it, but that should only affect his voting status in Florida. Oh, wait, he’s white. Florida doesn’t care about revoking his right to vote.) Seriously, though, if the terrorist watch list includes possible terrorist aliases like “Edward Kennedy,” how do folks named John Smith ever manage to get on board a plane? ...

Is it a story of greed, ambition, and ruin? Well, no, but it is a story of incompetence and indifference, and what happens when you can buy and sell a post office. Courtesy of The New York Times (free registration required)

Okay, so it turns out we’re not the only two people watching this show. (The premiere episodes, at least, turned out to have been pretty highly rated for UPN.) And, looking on some message boards, we’re definitely not the only folks who like Mose — it’s MOSE, not MOSES, English — the best of all the people in the house. However, I’m almost willing to guarantee, from the same boards, that we’re the only folks who like Ariel, the spaced-out vegan who believes cows might be aliens. Heck, I think she and Mose might work out as a couple. Too bad they’d probably have to live around cows. :) ...

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” President George W. Bush August 5, 2004 Remarks by the President at the Signing of H.R. 4613, the Defense Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2005

I realize we’re in the middle of fighting Evil, one medium-sized country at a time, but growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I still have a healthy respect for the nuclear weapons issue. (You know, the one that says we’re glad they haven’t been used in a while and we know the probability of their being used approaches 1 every time another country develops them.) From what I recall, as late as 1994 a primary concern of our government was making sure nuclear weapons capability wasn’t spreading around. We didn’t do a great job, but hey, it worked somewhat well for fifty years or so. ...