Oh, and before blogging I used to read news scavengers such as CommonDreams, alternative newsletters such as CounterPunch and blogs such as Juan Cole's, or Stan Goff's Feral Scholar.

The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler

Yes, Juan Cole is a kind of Strange Attractor in all this. My first introduction to Cole was via a Finnish chat room called 'Kinky Bar' which at that time was full of soft-intellectual malcontents, rather than the genuinely kinky (although an engineering Professor from the Tech University was into both). So it was more Chomsky than Choke-collars. I still have RW friends from that period.

You can't be me, I'm taken