Riverbend's family has left the country.

"It was as if a million political bloggers sighed in relief and were silent."

Riverbend is leaving Iraq.

Unfortunately, exams are too close for me to blog elaborately, so I don't have much more to pass on than the link.

But it's a relief, in a way. At least now when there is silence at Baghdad Burning for several months, there will not be morbid speculations about car bombs, government-ordered "disappearances" and the like. Or, well, not as much as before.

19.4.1981 - 16.3.2003

Yes, I post this every year.

I'm in the process of updating the blogroll of the Progressive Blogger Alliance, which begins with checking the status of each site and grouping them into categories like "active", "dead", "moved" etc. Thanks to the magic of PHP, this post will show my exact progress with this, as I am entering the status of each site in a neat MySQL table. Here's the breakdown: The total number of blogs is 227. This is the breakdown over status:

Status	Sites
	159
active	23
unreciprocating	11
gone	10
moved	7
dead	6
slow	6
temp_gone	4
titlechange	1

[break] And this is the list of sites, ordered by status:

Status	Site
pending check	OneWomanWreckingCrew
pending check	Mad Kane
pending check	Lucky White Girl
pending check	LOSLI
pending check	Logical Voice
pending check	Life in the Third Layer
pending check	anonyMoses
pending check	Another Liberal Blog
pending check	Anti-Zionist Notes
pending check	anti-[everything]
pending check	Antitheton
pending check	Apostate Windbag
pending check	Arancaytar's Little Corner
pending check	Arran's Alley
pending check	at ease
pending check	Atavistic Endeavor
pending check	Bait and Switch President
pending check	Banality Fair
pending check	Madison County Young Democrats
pending check	Maitri's VatulBlog
pending check	Majikthise
pending check	Ohio Liberal
pending check	Off-The-Record, Off-The-Wall
pending check	Odessa Street
pending check	Now Then
pending check	No Religion Now
pending check	NJ Spoken Word
pending check	Nick Lewis
pending check	NewsHog
pending check	Never Knew I was living in the

In summary, Drupal rocks.

The BBC article on Mugabe extending his reign - sorry, presidency - until 2010 has given me the opportunity for a little chuckle. So here's your World Politics Quote Of The Week:

Mugabe himself has decided to come clean about his succession. He basically has decided to succeed himself. (Johnathan Moyo, former Minister of Information, to the BBC

In other words, I suppose Dubya could be a lot worse than he is. But that remains to be seen in 2008...

I was looking for the quote from George Orwell's novel 1984 that begins "War is Peace." So I plugged it into Google, and noticed something funny in the suggestions (I use search auto-completion).

After entering "war is" Google already came up with a ton of suggestions that start that way. Suggestions are ranked by the number of results they return, so these quotes are ranked by their popularity.

These are the top 10:

• war is hell
• war is peace
• war is kind
• war is a force that gives us... [cut off]
• war is a racket
• war is not the answer
• war is peace freedom is... [cut off]
• war is good
• war is over
• war is peace 1984

This might be food for thought, but alas I don't have the time to comment on it because I need to get some work on my Nano done.

Edit: But I did enter "war is good", and notice that all suggestions were variations of "war is good for the economy".

After months of absence, during which the blogosphere was pretty much stirred into a frenzy of worry (Search Google, Google Blogs and Technorati for "Where is Riverbend" and you'll see what I mean), our favorite Iraqi blogger has finally returned to post.

She is unharmed and she hasn't left Iraq. She gave a "certain hopelessness" as a reason for not having blogged until now - that's understandable. I know many who feel that way about the Bush administration, and he didn't even invade the US. After a while, apathy takes over.

Her new post is about the Lancet study that concluded the Iraqi death toll was at 600,000.

That's six hundred, times a thousand. Picture a medium-sized city dropping dead in one moment. Americans - even the Americans on this side of the fence - keep moaning about the 2000-3000 troops that died in Iraq. It's like a division problem. Divide 600,000 by 2000, and see what you end up with. In that respect, the difference between the so-called "Bush league" and the "Pinko Terrorists" appears only to be that the left at least isn't proud that they managed to kill 300 Iraqis for every dead soldier.

Gah, I'm ranting again.

Well, head over to Baghdad Burning and go read. And, finally, exhale again.

She's all right.

Whew.

By the way, digg users should vote up this story so the good news can spread a bit more quickly.

Update 2006-10-19:
Look no further, friends:

There is Riverbend!
----------------------------

A bandwagon is quickly becoming apparent in the blogosphere: People are worrying about Riverbend.

These bandwagons, of course, are self-amplifying - the more people post about it, the more widely the worry spreads, leading to even more posts. So this amount of fear doesn't need to mean much. It could just be people scaring each other. Add this to the fact that Riverbend has frequently had blackouts of electricity and connectivity, leaving people waiting for weeks, and the whole situation is less bleak than it appears.

But I can't persuade myself of that. Even after the third or fourth time of posting "Where is Riverbend?" and then sighing in relief at the next post, the fears are immediately back.

Did she get kidnapped by the new religious brigades? Imprisoned by the Americans? Murdered? Even if nobody harmed her intentionally (and goodness, the world and especially that country is full of people who could and would love to do so if they found her) she could have been a bystander in one of the constant assassinations and bomb attacks. Or "friendly" fire at a checkpoint.

What she did and is hopefully still doing is amazing. She is risking her life and sanity to publish independent journalism in the most dangerous country to do so. People spit at her from all sites for their own agendas; she writes on.

As the result of a discussion on an online forum, I once got the following private message by someone in an apparent case of mistaken identity (he thought I was Riverbend... amusing).

hey fuck you ass hole. suck my american cock you douche bag. i hope you go to hell for making america look bad, faggot

This gave me an insight into the kind of things that actually reach their intended recipient (and, of course, into the intelligence of the average Bushist. But that's not new). And she never gave up blogging.

I just hope that nothing happened.

The US think-tank ISIS has apparently published the full text of Iran's response to a negotiation offer by the United Nations. The paper was previously classified, but was available for public download - for a while.

The full URL to the download was:

http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iran/responsetext.pdf

However, this URL now returns a 404 error. Apparently someone got cold feet (or into hot water) and pulled the file.

The link to it (second from top) is still on the index page however.

This is a scaled screenshot of the page. The text is just about legible:

Unfortunately, Google's cache didn't snatch it yet, or this bit of news would be a lot more interesting.

The last few weeks over at The Progressive Blogger Alliance have been filled with people asking to be put on the Blogroll. The Blogroll - actually one of the first efforts that the PBA grew from, before the network even used a central node based on Drupal software - was discontinued a while back. A mixture of administrative trouble, technical glitches and a rumor that the Google bot may interpret Blogrolls as link farms (and punish the sites' rankings).

The last one I don't know about. If it is true, it might be best to leave it be. But the other two are fairly easily solved.

One problem with the present PBA blogroll is that it uses an external service, Blogrolling.com, whose free accounts are limited and which is not easy to administrate. It is for all purposes impossible to administrate in a group (with shared access and multiple permission levels), which is the philosophy the PBA and Drupal works on.

The solution is obvious: A Drupal module for a blogroll. The links will be fed to it by members - perhaps this could even be meshed with a custom profile field or the Homepage profile field - and the output page will be a Javascript application that prints the links.

--

Some extra convenient settings for fine-tuning this blogroll (multiple links, RSS feeds, blocking certain links from certain sites, subgroups that only link amongst themselves to keep the length down, etc) could be added as well.

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Following this rough pipedream of a spec, the next step, naturally, is to see if this has been made before. If it hasn't, well... let's get going! ^_^