I’m hav­ing trou­ble with my noti­fi­ca­tion pro­gram again. I’m sorry for the spam.

Hello every­one, and sorry for the mass email­ing. I think I’ve fixed the noti­fi­ca­tion prob­lem, but, as you see, things look a bit _different_ at the moment. That’s because I was forced to com­pletely rein­stall “MoveableType”:http://www.moveabletype.org and use default tem­plates. I should be back to the style you know and (hope­fully) love in a lit­tle while.
A bit about the new noti­fi­ca­tion fea­tures. Now, when I post some­thing, the noti­fi­ca­tions will go out auto­mat­i­cally. You will receive an email with links to a page that will allow you to man­age your subscription(s). You can choose to have just the new entries sent to you, the com­ments only, or both.
You can also now sub­scribe to indi­vid­ual entries and their com­ments, so if you’re in an engag­ing con­ver­sa­tion, sub­scribe to a sin­gle entry and you’ll get an email when­ever some­one pipes up.
Again, you can change your options on your sub­scrip­tions man­age­ment page. You can even opt-out and remove your­self now. So no need to send me an email to me to take care of that for you. Decen­tral­iza­tion is grand, no?
If you’re not sub­scribed to B2I at all, you can sub­scribe using the “Sub­scribe” (duh) field to the right.
I hope you like the new fea­tures, and please let me know what you think!

in the midst of so much seri­ous­ness, my friend Char­lie Crain, who runs Bagh Blog, decided that if he couldn’t get out and inter­view real Iraqi or Amer­i­can offi­cials, “an online Magic 8-Ball would do.”:http://baghblog.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_baghblog_archive.html#110467853512654060
It’s a funny inter­view, not only because it’s entirely made up, but because it’s about as edi­fy­ing as a real inter­view with Iraqi or Amer­i­can offi­cials. Example:

Crain: With many Sunni areas over­whelmed by vio­lence or still under de-facto insur­gent con­trol, is there a risk that the com­ing vote will under-represent Sun­nis and make the insur­gency worse?
Magic 8-ball: Out­look hazy, try again.

And while this was an exer­cise in amuse­ment, the point remains. The out­look for Iraq is indeed hazy.