This pretty much sums it up: there is a very real danger that the Obama administration will enshrine permanently within the law policies and practices that were widely considered extreme and unlawful during the Bush administration. ACLU, Establishing a New Normal

Wikileaks recently released over 95,000 formerly secret documents related to the war in Afghanistan. Obviously, this has caused quite a buzz in the news media. Boing Boing and Dan Gilmore are expecting backlash from those who keep secrets. Me too, I guess. However, from what I've read about the documents, are there really surprises? The following aren't surprises, even to someone like me who doesn't pursue war news in depth: the war is going badly; lots of civilians are killed; US troops commit war crimes; Taliban and Al Qaeda are even worse; the Pakistani ISI aren't really our allies, but often work for the Taliban etc. Haven't we been hearing this for the last couple of years? Maybe that's why support for this war is declining rapidly.

The Whitehouse response is interesting. It's along the lines of That's so 2009. Things are better now and Pakistan is our ally. Yeah, right.

This is the golden age of music. I'm not referring to the quality of the music produced, although there's a tremendous amount of wonderful music being made right now. Rather, I mean the ability to listen to whatever you want, whenever you want it. Pick any tune or performance and google it and you'll likely find it available to be streamed or downloaded, usually legally. The streaming music services have improved over the last year so much that they represent an alternative to having your own collection. The popular services have millions of tunes of all type.

I subscribe to Rhapsody, probably the most complete library, but there are a number of other streaming services with similar libraries: MOG All-Access and Rdio to name just two others.

The three mentioned above require a monthly payment, although they all have free trials. Grooveshark is a free service where you can stream music uploaded by other people. It has music that doesn't show up on the other services, Zappa for example.

Of course, there's still lots of net radio, despite SoundExchange's attempt to kill it. The best web radio, of course, is WFMU, the greatest radio station in the universe.