Where is Raed ? updated at 6:05p Baghdad, 7a Seattle, about two hours ago.

He notes that is about two hours until the B-52s arrive, and as I write this, reports of intensified anti-aircraft fire are on NPR and CNN.

Near Real Time Satellite Images of Iraq – [via The Agonist, whose mind must be nearly gone by now: keep up the good work, Sean!]. Smoke plumes, perhaps?

Don’t I recall hearing that last time, it turned out the oil well fires were actually the result of Allied shelling? Must investigate.

Four news choppers over my neighborhood – it borders the freeway, and the P-I reports that the freeway-blocking tactic is in use. I hate hearing ’em over the house – it means beatings and tear gas.

Even if it means that I have not see the haul-away vans that often show up when the choppers do. I’ve heard that lots of cops are on National Guard call-up – I wonder if that means the SWAT samurai-vaders are Over There?

Interesting war link:

The Agonist is doing a blow-by-blow. Don’t miss his Annex. He points out, among other things, that Rand Beers, formerly the top U. S. anti-terror official, has resigned, apparently over concerns about the war’s impact on domestic security.

On a less gloomy note, Eric Sooros is getting married, and Kurt Easterwood and his wife Naoko are new parents in Japan, my friend John Strohm will be in town or is already, and the crows above Capitol Hill are still dive bombing that red-tailed hawk.

The New Yorker March 17, 2003	Harper’s April, 2003

Art director’s chagrin strikes again.

Women Gleeful at Return of Sponge Contraceptive [NYT]

best quote from the article:

In 1998, Gene Detroyer, a businessman who had started out developing disposable plates and cups for the maker of Hefty bags, heard that the rights to the sponge were for sale. He said he told his partner at Allendale, a scientist who exclaimed, “That’s a great product!”

Mr. Detroyer said he had since read enough letters from women echoing that same thought to believe that the new incarnation of Today would be a big seller. He sees a whole new generation of users among women in their 20’s who were not sexually active when the sponge was available.

“This is going to make millions of women very happy,” Mr. Detroyer said. “As happy as paper plates may make them, this is going to make them happier.”

I also learned that one may purchase not only the Today sponge from Canadian sources, but two other varieties of sponge as well.

Libeskind Plan Chosen for World Trade Center Site (NYT) – which pleases me, I must say. The design struck me as head-and-shouldrs above he other designs. I thought I’d blogged the designs back in December, but apparently not.

In a reading experience simply PACKED with synchronicities, last night, after watching a terrifying NOVA devoted to the charmingly low-tech “Dirty Bomb,” which featured unsettlingly high-quality visualizations of a bomb-blast in London’s Trafalgar Square, I opened my March issue of Smithsonian to find a story (full text PDF) about the same thing.

A few pages in, and here’s a comprehensive profile of Daniel Libeskind.

And here we are, a day later. What’s next, a stunning revelation about Macchu Picchu?

Boing Boing links to a Washington Post article that reveals links between the GOP and America’s largest manufacturer of duct tape.

Which made me think of a few things I joked about, why, just the other day!

The Beeb just bannered the EU turnabout with the phrase “EU leaders put on a show of unity over Iraq” which I heard as “EU leaders put on a show of lunacy over Iraq.”

Which made me pay some attention, I must say.

US to punish German ‘treachery’: in a poorly sourced story, the Observer reports that

The US will withdraw all its troops and bases from there and end military and industrial co-operation between the two countries – moves that could cost the Germans billions of euros.

which echoes the long excerpt from Jim Henley‘s site that Scott ran the other day.

I’ll wager this trial b’loon from Defense gets a big, BIG BIG thumbs up in Germany.

One question, though: Does the U.S. get to keep Daimler-Chrysler? Seems like maybe an end to “industrial co-operation” might make it hard for Benz owners.

AND ANOTHER THING – even if pulling the troops would set off a depression in Germany (the apparent goal of the threat), um, didn’t Europe have a traumatizing few years in the wake of the last time punitive measures were taken against Germany’s economy? Oh, that’s right, it led to a fascist state.

Hilarious. I suppose after Iraq we’ll just have to “fix” the broken democracies of France, Germany, and – OMG – Britain, which obviously needs military reinforcement after this weekend. Of course, it takes a long time to fly a million people out to the North Sea in helicopters and pitch ’em in, a few at a time – but what was tried and tested in Chile is gonna work for Rummy, by God!

Somehow, I doubt that there are gonna be massive troop withdrawals from Germany.

Google buys Blogger: what can possibly be said about this that hundreds aren’t already saying?

It’s a milestone. Blogger service-disruption issues and ad-based hosting plan were significant determinants in driving me to investigate self-hosting… I may have service outages but I’m not helpless before them, and I can keep ads off my content.

An additional decision point was that I wanted to be absolutely clear in my publication title to the material I would post here – publishing it through a third party system, even a company as apparently altruistic as Pyra, leaves a copyright and reproducibilty hole that any decent publisher would not hesitate to drive a delivery truck through should the opportunity manifest.

Anyway, it’s big news, Google is without a doubt the most trusted online brand, and that goes far to mitigate many of the concerns that led to my selection of Movable Type. Does that mean the end for MT and other self-hosted blogging solutions?

I think it probably cuts their projected future growth, and might (if Ben and Mena see this) drive them toward developing a commercial licensing model. Last time I checked, they explicitly disavowed such a thing, specifically because they derive revenue from helping people set up the application. That’s practically the definition of short-sighted because of the way it limits their install base and bases revenue on labor rather than licensing.

Google’s extended services have been interesting to watch as they mature, as well. Google News, at first, was a fantastic aggregator of news, including news from oddball, unreliable sources that I was overjoyed to see – Middle-Eastern papers that have an explicitly critical agenda on U. S. foreign policy issues, propaganda papers, papers espousing religious kookery of all stripes, blogs, you name it.

Now, however, after much refinement, it’s lost a great deal of this diversity unless you force the issue. So instead of seeing a Palestininan paper and Ha’aretz covering the same events in that sad and bloody place, you just see the Ha’aretz link (I’m generalizing here, people, and the example is quite possibly inaccurate).

Obviously, this insulates Google from the criticism that followed the implementation of Google News, but I’m less well served by this – I want to see what people who DON’T write for a Euro-American audience have to say about things in the world, and Google News appears to have deprecated those sources compared to the early days.

This is true outside of world politics as well. As the online news editor for Cinescape, Google News was a great way to dig up stories that did an end run around the efficient publicity machine of the film studios. The studios so effectively dominate entertainment news that many days, it’s difficult to find a story about anything other than Hollywood stars and Hollywood films.

At first Google News was a reliable source for these unconventionally sourced stories – nearly as reliable as blogs. Now, however, the same stories, often from the same wire sources, are seen in Google Entertainment News as are on Yahoo!’s AP and Reuters feeds.

How will this homogenization effect – a predictable consequence of designing for-profit services to take advantage of economies of scale – affect blogging now that it’s entered the Googleocracy?