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Over the past few years, as the blogosphere has grown, more and more soldiers' blogs have been gaining fame and notoriety on the web. Many are wonderfully written, others are full of pictures of all different kinds. Most are just blogs that happen to be written by soldiers. But the Army today vowed to more strictly enforce the dissemination of sensitive information online by its soldiers. One soldier has already been disciplined under the new rules. Included in the list of examples given for "sensitive information" was "vulnerabilities." What sort of effect might this have on soldiers' entries in the future, especially those who aren't satisfied with the direction the war in Iraq has taken?
posted by wakko at 11:46 PM PST - 23 comments

Teenage tribes and Council sponsored "mayhem".
posted by lerrup at 11:24 PM PST - 26 comments

St. James Infirmary, in a funereal, no lyrics, brass-band version underlies a persistent scrum of half-remembered songs about New Orleans rising in concert with the waters, lapping at the sandbags of my mind. Up front, Tom Waits (I Wish I Was in New Orleans) and Randy Newman (Lousiana 1927) are duking it out for time at the piano, elaborately filigreed chords overlapping and changing the dominant lyric at the moment of harmonic convergence, while in the background Arlo Guthrie (The City of New Orleans) warbles about a train ride. Professor Longhair and/or The Dixie Cups (Big Chief, Iko Iko) sort of amusedly fight to keep sliptime with the martial drums from Jimmy Driftwood's The Battle of New Orleans (caution: embedded quicktime) behind the whole toxic soup of sonic residue. I'm sure the stew will grow more dense over the next couple weeks. Got a New Orleans song to toss into the waters?
posted by mwhybark at 10:58 PM PST - 45 comments

Did God create hurricane Katrina? Well, probably not. But perhaps, it was George Bush continuing his plan for world domination by using HAARP and scalar technology to control the weather by applying the suppressed theories of Nikola Tesla! See, once Bush has induced economic armageddon it will quickly induce the peak oil crisis thus leading to permanent martial law whereby he'll be able to suspend the constitution. Once all these pesky government controls have been removed, then Bush will finally be able to achieve the neocon dream of a New American Century.
posted by slogger at 10:13 PM PST - 57 comments

The Gospel of Slavery: A Primer of Freedom. An 1864 antislavery treatise, uploaded to flickr.com. (Cory Doctorow at Boingboing says, "When I see stuff like this, I sometimes get a thrill to my toes as I realize that practically every document of this vintage will soon be on the web and only a quick search away.")
posted by Guy Smiley at 9:49 PM PST - 16 comments

More than 30 feet of water stood over land inhabited by nearly one million people. Almost 300,000 African Americans were forced to live in refugee camps for months. Many people, both black and white, left the land and never returned. "When Mother Nature rages, the physical results are never subtle. Because we cannot contain the weather, we can only react by tabulating the damage in dollar amounts, estimating the number of people left homeless, and laying the plans for rebuilding. But . . . some calamities transform much more than the landscape." No, not Katrina. The Great Mississippi flood of 1927. Author John M. Barry in his definitive work on the subject, "shows how a heretofore anti-socialist America was forced by unprecedented circumstance to embrace an enormous, Washington-based big-government solution to the greatest natural catastrophe in our history, preparing the way (psychologically and otherwise) for the New Deal." The author is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Center for Bioenvironmental Research of Tulane and Xavier universities (whose web site is *understandably* not answering right now). <Heading for the library to find this book>
posted by spock at 6:14 PM PST - 12 comments

Time-lapse videos of hurricanes from space from Nasa's Marshall Space Flight Center's Camex-4 Hurricane study. [note: Quicktime]
posted by crunchland at 4:43 PM PST - 10 comments

Black people loot, white people borrow. Racist photo captions by Yahoo News/AP illuminate more than Katrina's aftermath. If these pictures are taken down, there are mirrors right here.
posted by bairey at 4:37 PM PST - 211 comments

Jerry Falwell makes outspoken comment about civil rights for gays. He's for 'em. Maybe, as SoVo.com supposes, SoulForce has succeeded in it's close quarters outreach to their old foe/ex-ally. Maybe that's a lesson to us all...
posted by dash_slot- at 4:24 PM PST - 23 comments

A horde of zombies attacked the 'American Idol ' auditions in Austin, Texas. "No one was hurt." Photo gallery. [Note: Not believed to be shilling for corporations or any specific movie.]
posted by ericb at 3:51 PM PST - 40 comments

Crashed Cars of Kuwait With a 120kph (75mph) highway speed limit, an 80kph (50mph) urban speed limit, a lot of expensive high performance cars, next to no law enforcement, driving in Kuwait can be a little, err, exciting. Psycho Milt, a New Zealander working in Kuwait, has a substantial and ever-growing flickr photoset of crashed cars he's snapped on his daily commute.
posted by noizyboy at 3:37 PM PST - 19 comments

Let the bush bashing begin. Funding for work on New Orleans' flood prevention system slowed to a trickle in 2003, and many people (long before Monday) claimed that was due to the Iraq war. [more inside]
posted by delmoi at 2:58 PM PST - 182 comments

smugMaps, photo-sharing mixed with Google Maps, allowing you to associate your photos with geographic locations. See the mysterious lost mountain city of Machu Picchu, the spectacular, lonely landscapes of Iceland, and an apartment building in St. Louis. They can't all be glamorous, folks.
posted by Gamblor at 2:17 PM PST - 11 comments

A German in Los Angeles. (link in english) Stern is running a series on a German immigrant's experience of moving to Los Angeles and the various cultural differences he's experienced, including getting cable (en) and a driver's license (en), buying a car (en) and being homesick (en), and the American love for iced drinks (en). Really interesting cultural perspective.
posted by fet at 2:09 PM PST - 23 comments

Harder than diamond. Compress C60 with heat, and get the hardest substance known. But will it be pretty?
posted by birdsquared at 1:47 PM PST - 10 comments

Jool Holland hits a high note and whilst his rythm n blues band is not evident at his happy event on the BBC website, there are others known to a UK audience. Any chance you have to catch up with this performer is worth going an extra mile, [scratch that - make it 50 miles.] Tour dates are here.
posted by Schroder at 11:01 AM PST - 21 comments

Governor Pardons All But Himself In Personnel Investigation In case y'all thought Kentucky's only problem was obesity. The local paper's article has a sidebar of related stories, including a link to a "full coverage" series on this Merit System Investigation. As he told the Grand Jury, "I would like this to be a new day."
posted by davy at 10:19 AM PST - 59 comments

The MESSENGER spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral on August 3, 2004 and returned to Earth for its first gravity boost on the way to Mercury a year later on August 2, 2005. MESSENGER took hundreds of high-res digital photos during its Earth flyby and they've been sequenced into an amazing movie of Earth rotating over 24 hours as the spacecraft swung past at thousands of miles per hour.
posted by driveler at 10:15 AM PST - 31 comments

Talking Primates with Frans de Waal: Frans de Waal is a primatologist who's challenged male supremacy in evolution, the belief that monkeys don't perceive images as we do, and the idea that they don't possess emotions ascribed to humans. His new book, Our Inner Ape, posits that the human duality of good and evil is in fact something we've inherited directly from primates.
posted by veronica sawyer at 9:44 AM PST - 28 comments

Free Opera serial numbers. Want to try a new browser? For their 10th birthday, Opera is giving away free serial numbers for their web browser to anyone who registers. The codes are available today (August 30, 2005) only and remove the annoying ad bar. Opera is available for all major (and many minor) operating systems. You can learn more about the browser's features (like a built in BitTorrent client) or just go straight to the download page so you have somewhere to put that new registration code.
posted by revgeorge at 8:55 AM PST - 78 comments

Tim Hardin, black sheep boy. Will Robinson Sheff, of the bands Okkervil River and Shearwater, guest-blogs at Said the Gramophone and writes movingly about his hero, Tim Hardin. With mp3s.
posted by barjo at 8:47 AM PST - 11 comments

US Army auditor who attacked Halliburton deal is fired. Bunnatine Greenhouse, senior Army Contracting Specialist and the highest-ranking civilian at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), who blew the whistle on Halibuton after Halliburton subsidiary Kellog Brown & Root got $12 billion worth of exclusive contracts for work in Iraq has been fired - ostensibly for poor performance. Ms Greenhouse testified in front of Congress (pdf). She asked many questions: Why is Halliburton -- a giant Texas firm that holds more than 50 percent of all rebuilding efforts in Iraq -- getting billions in contracts without competitive bidding? Do the durations of those contracts make sense? Have there been violations of federal laws regulating how the government can spend its money? She said that the decision to award KBR a $75 million extension for troop support in the Balkans was "the most blatant and improper abuse I have witnessed" in 20 years as a government contract supervisor. Last October, she was summoned to the office of her boss. Major Gen. Robert Griffin, the Corps' deputy commander, was demoting her, he told her, taking away her Senior Executive Service status and sending her to midlevel management. She was offered early retirement, but refused. Now she's been fired.
posted by three blind mice at 8:28 AM PST - 52 comments

CNN weatherman Chad Myers loses it on air with anchor Carol Costello.
posted by Count Ziggurat at 8:26 AM PST - 71 comments

Where do you go to find the bleeding edge of motion graphics, visual FX , broadcast design and (QT link) music videos? Tween.
posted by pepcorn at 6:29 AM PST - 2 comments

Flickr Fans to Yahoo: Flick Off! (by Wired News). "A splinter faction of Flickr photo-sharing community members is threatening a symbolic "mass suicide" to protest closer integration with the website's new owner, Yahoo." Welcome to the Flickr Accounts Mass Suicide Countdown group - Flick Off.
posted by webmeta at 6:01 AM PST - 91 comments

The Landmark Trust. Ever wanted to stay somewhere with a little more class and history than the usual chain hotels? The landmark trust is a UK charity dedicated to restoring unique and historical buildings; they finance their work by renting them out to their members. While most of their buildings are scattered across the UK they also have four in Italy and four in New England, including Rudyard Kipling's personally designed house, Naulakha. In Florence, they have Robert and Elizabeth Browning's flat, though in Rome they only have the flat above the one in which Keats died (though it is nicely located at the Spanish steps). Unfortunately you have to pay to get the Handbook which shows all they have to offer, but featured buildings in their site include Fort Clonque, Swarkestone Pavilion and the Lutyens designed Goddards. Amongst their next goals; preventing the 1830 folly, Clavell Tower from falling into the sea. Nothing less than pr0n for the architecturally inclined.
posted by biffa at 4:59 AM PST - 8 comments

ay yo trip!
posted by Citizen Premier at 4:20 AM PST - 4 comments

Rape Charge Follows Marriage to a 14-Year-Old [NYTimes] Mr. Koso is 22. The baby's mother, Crystal, is 14. He is charged with statutory rape, even though they were wed with their parents' blessing in May, crossing into Kansas because their own state prohibits marriages of people under 17. The Nebraska attorney general accuses Mr. Koso of being a pedophile; they say it is true love.
posted by psmealey at 3:47 AM PST - 79 comments

Streetsy
posted by srboisvert at 1:46 AM PST - 15 comments

Tagging bbc radio songs via mobile phone
posted by Tlogmer at 1:35 AM PST - 7 comments

The wonderful architecture blog Transfer is the home of The Anti-Sit Archives, an astonishing collection of, well, urban ass-deflecting devices. [thanks to iconomy]
posted by mediareport at 12:45 AM PST - 17 comments

A War to Be Proud Of. Christopher Hitchens in the Weekly Standard.
posted by semmi at 12:33 AM PST - 183 comments