rob.neppell.org

Has anyone else noticed that Taiwan and China have been quietly stumbling towards a potentially real shooting war over the past few days?

Glenn is reporting on a major story expected to hit the WaPo tomorrow morning: that of an internal Pentagon briefing which clearly painted Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the United States.
One man, however, bravely (ahem) stood his ground against this view:

Of the two dozen people who attended the Defense Policy Board meeting, only one, former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger, spoke up to object to the anti-Saudi conclusions of the briefing, according to sources who were there. Some members of the board clearly agreed with Kissinger’s dismissal of the briefing and others did not.
One source summarized Kissinger’s remarks as, “The Saudis are pro-American, they have to operate in a difficult region, and ultimately we can manage them.”

What a surprise. How’s that whole can’t-travel-without-consulting-your-lawyer-for-fear-of-getting-nipped-on-murder-charges thing treating you, Henry? Gotten any Christmas cards from Chile lately?

No, not a I’m-going-away-and-the-heck-with-you-all break, just a few days sans blogging. I think it’s healthy.
Expect light to no posting for the next week or so; I shall be focusing on the non-bloggy things in life…
-NZB

Since I assume — and hope — he won’t be surfing the ‘blogs over the weekend, I’m sending this out a little early:
Congrats to VodkaDude and the soon-to-be Mrs. VodkaDude!
Stephen: Make your lady happy, as I know you will.
Melissa: Try to keep him out of trouble. But not completely, he’s more interesting when he’s not totally well behaved.
Have a magical day & congrats, you two…
-NZB

The Indepundit has analyzed campaign contribution data tracked by OpenSecrets.org and noticed an absolutely staggering cluster of donations on September 11th, 2001.
Check out his results to find out who gave the cash, and whose campaign war chest — if you’ll pardon the expression — got stocked up on the day our nation mourned.
It is a must read. Go now; I don’t even care if you come back.

Phillip at Second p0st is doing some great things with his new version of an ecosystem-like link counting routine — he’s now got 1452 blogs on his list, and even allows you to see the specific inbound and outbound links for a particular blog on demand (a feature I’ve wanted to add to my own routine, but found too annoying to do with my tinfoil-and-duct-tape solution).
Excellent work; cool to see other folks driving ahead in this space…

This is completely unacceptable.
Barbarians.

My hosting service is having intermittent slowdowns & outages today. They’re working on it, but if you try to come back later & get an error, be persistent; you should get through eventually.
Sorry…