I know I haven’t blogged here in a while (I’ve been really busy), but my move to keep the Brendansphere in constant up-to-datedness of upcoming political races has brought me out of my cocoon, at least for now :-)

Yesterday, Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE), the ranking Democrat on the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee, announced that he would run for the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential nomination. Of course, he was very clear that if it looked like he didn’t have much of a chance, he’d drop out right away.

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I haven’t blogged much about Dick Durbin’s outrageous comments regarding Guantanamo Bay, largely because of all the technical difficulties with my blog in recent days, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about them. Durbin’s statement that alleged U.S. abuses at Guantanamo are literally equivalent to the genocidal actions of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot is, of course, utterly outrageous and shameful (not because it is inherently wrong to make such an analogy under any circumstances, but because it is grossly inappropriate in this factual situation), and if Durbin maintains his leadership position as the #2 Democrat in the Senate despite spewing such nonsense, that may very well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and leads me to disassociate myself from the Democratic Party once and for all. Trent Lott, after all, lost his leadership position in the GOP after making a comment so offensive and outrageous that it shocked the conscience. So should Durbin. In the mean time, the party of Dean and Durbin is becoming increasingly difficult to call “my party.”

Anyway, for those of us (like me) who think that detainee abuse by American soldiers is a big problem, but who nevertheless find the analogies to Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot to be so over-the-top that they are utterly replusive and fraudulent, I thought this take on Durbin’s comments was rather good:

Senator Richard Durbin has been justly mocked for his statement about [abuses at Guantanamo being equivalent to what was “done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings.”] …

The more plausible analogy to Guantanamo is British interrogation of Irish Republican Army suspects in the early 1970s. Then, the British extracted confessions through “the five techniques”: wall-standing, hooding, continuous noise, deprivation of food, and deprivation of sleep. The European Court of Human Rights, in the 1978 case Republic of Ireland v. United Kingdom, ruled that the techniques did not constitute “torture,” but were “inhuman and degrading,” in violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The European convention obviously does not apply to the American interrogation of Arab or Afghan terrorist suspects at a military base in Cuba, but there are still plausible objections that can be raised against coercive interrogations, even when the persons being interrogated are terrorists. Serious discussion about Guanatamo would be enhanced by looking to appropriate historical analogies (such as the U.K.’s self-defense in the 1970s against the I.R.A.), rather than to absurd analogies, such as those drawn by Senator Durbin, which trivialize the Holocaust, the Soviet genocide, and the Pol Pot genocide.

Which is a bigger surprise: the anti-Syrian candidates’ victory in the Lebanese election, or the New York Times’s statement (in the third paragraph of the day’s top story, no less) that the result is “perhaps an example of a greater yearning for democracy in the Arab world”?

I forgot to make note of my third blogiversary back in April, but this is an equally momentous occasion. Three years ago today, almost at this very hour, I registered the domain name BrendanLoy.com.

I just renewed it moments ago, as it was set to expire tomorrow (Tuesday). I paid $30 and now have the domain through June 21, 2007.

P.S. I know the April blogiversary is old news, but re-reading that April 6, 2002 post — my first real blog post (after several “test” posts on April 4) — is really quite amusing, in retrospect. I especially like these excerpts:

“Blogs” are a growing phenomenon on the Web these days. They are basically personal bulletin boards. The owner can post whatever he/she wants, whenever he/she wants, and it will immediately show up on his/her website. The technical aspects of the uploading process are taken care of by Blogger.com, which makes life much easier for the blog owner — in this case, me.

Unlike the tradition method of updating my website — typing out articles in HTML format, playing with fonts, tinkering with the layout, etc. — blogging makes it very easy to update my website instantly, whenever I feel like it. The goal here is to actually keep my website fresh, with updates at least every couple of days…

Little did I know! :)

Also:

Kudos to Andrew Long, my conservative friend, for guiding me toward the joys on blogging. … Andrew knew about blogging because apparently, a lot of conservatives have blogs that they use to spread their ideological views, in defiance of the left-wing media establishment (not to be confused with the vast right-wing conspiracy).

I don’t plan to use my blog for ideological purposes, though. (Ashcroft sucks!) Mostly I’ll be blogging in my traditional narcissistic style, babbling about inconsequential details of my life, as if anyone really cares. :)

Well, some things never change (the narcissistic part), but some other things definitely do. :)

Heh.

Fellow rising 2Ls at NDLS will be glad to know that, as of today, we have exactly 700 days till graduation! Woohoo! :)

Gates-haters with OS X Tiger will appreciate these new Dashboard widgets: Bill Gates picking his nose and Bill Gates in bed with a Mac. Heh.

In other Apple-related technololgy news, the Queen has an iPod.

Retief Goosen collapsed, Tiger Woods blinked, and unknown New Zealander Michael Campbell won the U.S. Open.

In the wake of news that two hard-liners beat out the leading moderate candidate to qualify for a runoff in Iran’s presidential election, the moderate is claiming the vote was rigged.

CIA director Porter Goss made some intriguing, cryptic comments about Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts in an interview with Time magazine:

Q: When will we get Osama bin Laden?

A: That is a question that goes far deeper than you know. In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links. And I find that until we strengthen all the links, we’re probably not going to be able to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice. We are making very good progress on it. But when you go to the very difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you’re dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play. We have to find a way to work in a conventional world in unconventional ways that are acceptable to the international community.

Q: It sounds like you have a pretty good idea of where he is. Where?

A: I have an excellent idea of where he is. What’s the next question?

Is the Bush Administration seriously letting concerns over what’s “acceptable to the international community” get in the way of catching Osama? I find that hard to believe.

Mt.cgi is back online. Woohoo!

I’m in the process of making a few changes, including installing the newest version of MovableType. More soon.

UPDATE: Upgrade complete; the blog should now be fully functional again. Guestbloggers may feel free to blog away!

Poor Robbie always gets the short-shrift when it comes to petblogging. The fish have their own webcam, and the cats have their own special day. But hey, at least Robbie, unlike our other pets, can apparently fly:

Here’s another shot. Pretty cool, eh?

I’ve submitted to Total Choice Hosting my “plan of action” for securing mt.cgi — to prevent the events that led to Wednesday’s website outage from recurring — but apparently the Level 2 techs don’t work weekends, so it looks like my regular blog interface won’t be functional again until Monday at the earliest. Dammit. I guess I’ll have to keep directly editing index.html for a while longer. My deepest apologies to everyone who is going through BrendanLoy.com withdrawal! :)

CORRECTION: Apparently Bill H., the tech who has been working with me on this problem, does work weekends. He just wrote back and said he will re-enable MT tomorrow morning. So stay tuned; we’ll be back in business soon! Yay!!!

Once upon a time, Becky and I had a serpent sea star. It was one of my favorite creatures in our initial batch of aquarium-dwellers, and it looked like a giant spider, so I gave it a nerdy Lord of the Rings name: Shelob.

Alas, Shelob died, like all of the “original 13″ except Ugmo, the hardy mandarin fish. But today, Becky and I bought a new serpent sea star. (It was selling for $10 at an aquarium store right across the street from us, which, amazingly, we just discovered today.)

I contemplated naming the new sea star Shelob II (much like Nemo II, our new clownfish), but instead settled on a far better, cooler name. So ladies and gentlemen, I give you… Ungoliant:

We’re acclimating her to our water right now, but stay tuned to the FishCams, because in a few minutes, we’ll be releasing her into the aquarium.

UPDATE: The aquarium’s a bit cloudy right now, because of something Becky inadvertently did with the sump, but we’re trying to wait till it clears up before we release Ungoliant.

UPDATE 2: Becky has summarily decided that Ungoliant is a stupid name, and the new sea star should be called Shelob after all. So, Shelob II it is. :)

The live (Java) FishCam was screwed up during Shelob’s grand entrance into the aquarium, but here’s an AVI video (1.1 MB).

I’m blogging from Quizno’s, thanks to downtown South Bend’s public wi-fi project. Sweet! Here are some bullet points of interest:

• By popular demand, I’ll start with the day’s most cosmically insignificant news: Tom Cruise proposed to Katie Holmes at the Eiffel Tower this morning. She said yes. (Whatever… my aerial proposal was still way cooler.) “No wedding date has been set,” Cruise said. A break-up date has been secretly set, though: the first day that both War of the Worlds and Batman Begins are no longer in theaters. :)
• Elsewhere in Paris, two California college students posed naked at the Arc De Triomphe yesterday. The French promptly surrendered, and the students are the new president and prime minister of France.
• California was hit by two more earthquakes yesterday. I blame Karl Rove; clearly, his plan for a “Permament Republican Majority” involves California falling into the ocean.
• It’s 130 degrees in India. Probably also Karl Rove’s fault.
• New opinion poll shows extremely low approval ratings for President Bush and his policies. Noted conservative commentator Charles Chambers immediately rejects poll as partisan and obviously untrue, points out for the 28th time that Bush won the November election. (Sorry, Charles, couldn’t resist…)
• Ralph Nader says the n-word. Perhaps he fears losing his loony left base and wants to shore up support on the racist right?
• BREAKING NEWS! Americans hate the French.
• BREAKING NEWS! British people are silly.
• BREAKING NEWS! Dick Durbin is an asshole. Republicans are unhappy.
• Last but not least, William Rehnquist celebrates his 19th anniversary as chief justice today. Will he make it to 20? Most court-watchers think he’ll resign within the next two weeks, but some say “he looks better than he had been, is keeping a regular schedule and, maybe most important of all, still loves his work. All that adds up to the possibility - still slim - that he’ll confound everyone and stay put, perhaps for another full term.”