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Another quick note on the matter of the practicalities of speech-oriented boycotts:

It’s the Internet era. We’re moving inexorably closer to the day when you can’t shut anyone up. Ask Christopher Allbritton — not that anyone was trying to shut him up, but he’s a great demonstration of how much the reach of the independent commentator/journalist has grown. People who want to get their message across need big media less and less.

Right now, you can pull together a sizable interest group without media help. That’s a distinct change in social possibilities. You probably can’t put together an interest group big enough to matter in a national election, but the day is coming. Put differently: South Park got on the air because a little Christmas card video was distributed all over the Internet.

Those who want to influence the opinions of the future ought to be thinking about establishing the core mechanisms for person-to-person communication right now.

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“I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting,” he said. “The likelihood of it seems to me to be so low that it does not surprise me that it’s never been discussed in my presence to my knowledge.”

“He” is Donald Rumsfeld. Dude. Not even considered? Not even thought about it? Everyone else in the world has mentioned it, and you didn’t even talk about how to answer the question when it came up? I mean, senior military officials have thought about it.

Yeesh.

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Here and there, I’ve seen some snide commentary about Madonna and copyright, thanks to this article. Madonna’s been putting out decoy MP3s on the filesharing systems lately. Wendy Seltzer argues that since trademarks are intended to “protect consumers by defending a source’s association with quality goods and services,” Madonna may be diluting her own trademark by associating “Madonna” with the decoy files.

Um, yeah. So if the next Matrix flick really sucks, Joel Silver will lose the trademark on “Matrix” as it applies to movies? Does Garth Brooks know that putting out crap albums will make it impossible for him to keep his name trademarked?

There are times when we arrogant geeks should just get over ourselves, and this is one of those times.

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War’s not over (you wouldn’t want to visit Mosul without an escort just now) but I think it’s about past time to stop scouring the Internet for news. Nothing’s gonna happen suddenly at this point, and if something does happen suddenly it’ll be big and someone will walk down the hall and stick their head into my office to tell me so. So: the war blogroll goes back to whence it came, and some of the blogs wind up on my other blogrolls, and I continue on my pensive way.