Holiday give away

I have a bunch of gmail invites to give away. So if anyone out there doesn't yet have a gmail account and has been lusting after on then this could be your lucky year. If so send me email: blogger at longdarkteatime.com.

America's first coup

Most countries have numerous skeletons in their closet, if you go back far enough you'll reach a period when pretty much anything goes. As a Brit I can lay claim an exceptionally long history of colonial ills - its not something they teach in school either, its more a deeply entrenched part of the British psyche. We know we did wrong in India, in Africa, in... well pretty much everywhere we invaded and added to the British Empire.

As for America's prior indescretions overseas, well I guess I'm just slow to catch up on those - they certainly aren't on the tip of people's tongues. So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that the CIA colluded with the Brits in 1953 to overthrow the elected leader of Iran and replace him with their own stooge. I've heard something about this, but never the full story. So here it is as signed off by Eisenhower himself and all driven by the lust for, get this... oil. Yes the Brits didn't want the elected leader Mohammad Mosaddeq to nationalize the British run oil business in Iran so they worked together with the USA who wanted to stop communists from being elected in Iran. Together they worked to "take care" of that little problem. The coup was recently acknowledge by Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, and was also written about in the New York Times along with a handy time-line of the whole sordid affair.

And you wonder why people march today in the streets with "No blood for oil" signs? Is it time for me to say again "History repeats"? Nah, why bother, no one even learns history these days, let alone learns from it.

Stingy States of America

Well I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought that the USA was being stingy with their promise of a whopping $15 million of aid. Unlike poor Jan Egeland of the UN I don't have to do any back-peddling and hastily say I misinterpreted that figure and that it was actually "very generous". No, I can sit back and gloat as Bush back-peddles himself and suddenly forms another of his famous "collations", this time a "coalition of the giving". Obviously someone was listening to world opinion in the White House.

However, I'm lead to wonder why on earth the USA feels the need to form yet another coalition lead by the USA to deal with aid for the affected areas. Why not use this as an opportunity to back the UN and other world aid organizations and let them do what they are designed to do. In a years time I wonder how the world response to this disaster will be judged?

Somehow I'm reminded of 1984 when the worlds people got sick of big governments lack of action over the famine in Ethiopia. It took a bunch of pop stars to get together in the UK and raise 8 million GBP with their Band Aid "Do they know its Christmas?" single, and then globally raise over $100 million with the "Live Aid" concert (most of which came from European donations). It just so happens the "Band Aid 20" anniversary charity single has topped the charts for Christmas in the UK this year.

Maybe this time we shouldn't wait for the pop stars to solicit our donations, and we can all do better than the still stingy $0.10 per person the US government has pledged. I personally just donated 1000 times that amount so how about visiting the NPR tsunami relief donations page (or Network for Good) and selecting a charity of your choice to give some hard earned cash to?

Damaged business or improved service?

News.com just published a story about how the free Craigslist community web site has cost Bay Area newspapers $65 million in lost employment advertising revenue and damaged the local classified advertising business to the tune of millions. Well, that's how the Classified Intelligence report they cited spans it, but they would, wouldn't they?

From my perspective CraigsList has done nothing but good and anything that takes revenue away from the advertising business is inherently good. That could be because I don't work for an advertising company, or a company that derives most if not all of its revenue from advertising. But from that vantage point I'd say the CraigsList experience shows that people all over the world have discovered that doing business person to person works, just ask those who buy and sell daily on eBay.

Sure its a different way to do business, one of the most important differences is that buyers and sellers have to trust each other. For many its a huge leap of faith to complete their first such transaction on a person to person basis. Sure it is open to abuse, but the reality is that the huge majority of all such trades go well and the benefit of eliminating middle men, of creating a vast low overhead global market for obscure used (and even new) items, and a focused local market with no need for shipping, far outweigh the risk.

Besides, did you ever get ripped off in some way by a regular business, even by a huge supposedly trustworthy "efficient" corporation? Did you ever get such shoddy service you swore you'd never shop somewhere again, and did you ever by something that turned out to be a piece of crap and find you were unable to get satisfaction without resorting to legal action? Sure you have, and even if you think you haven't realise that consumers are exploited daily in a far more sinister way. Its a steady drip, drip, drip of price fixing, the consequences of efforts to stamp out competition in a market, or companies willfuly hiding information about harmful or faulty goods (think drugs, tires, and cigarettes) while continuing to sell them because the profit exceeds the eventual cost of compensation. It's no wonder we see giant class action suits, and no wonder corporations would rather support someone who would like to see such suits outlawed.

The benefit of doing business person to person is that by eliminating extraneous middle men the price can be lower and because buyers meet sellers more directly. Also CraigsList and eBay have managed to create huge markets for buying and selling used goods that might otherwise have just remained in closets, or been thrown out with the garbage. Again their ability to bring more buyers and sellers together creates a more efficient market, and by recycling items that are still worth more than their component materials they eliminate wastage in the economy. This allows resources that would otherwise have been utilized to recreate them, to be used in the production of something else - or to just stay unused for future use. Local markets all save on all those transportation costs - if you can buy someone elses used Ikea couch from around the corner then Ikea wont have to ship one all the way from Ikealand (Sweden) or more likely somewhere in Asia.

I should also point out that the inference that CraigsList is doing harm by "taking away" $65m in employment advertising revenue from other advertisers by some kind of magical and unfair means is pretty vaccuous. If you remember CraigsList employment ads are actually the one service it actually charges for. So it managed to compete in the employment advertising market by entirely fair means - and is doing very well at it. If anything CraigsList is at a disadvantage because it has to use all the profits from employment advertising to subsidize all its other services making them entirely free. That's opposed to the usual way of doing business which requires a significant amount of the profits being spent on staff to sell the advertising in the first place. The lesson to be learned is that the best places for advertising are the ones that don't ever ask for advertising.

When you think about it, the millions of revenue "lost" to sites like CraigsList or perhaps billions lost to eBay are not lost at all, it is just spent elsewhere. Money is only ever lost when its spent on something that is overpriced or that will never be utilized to its full potential. If I buy a car, keep it in the garage for ten years and then send it to the crusher well sure that provides jobs for the people who built the car and all the middlemen who got it to the showroom and the sales guy who sold it to me and the finance people who loaned me the money to buy it and the insurance agent who insured it etc. etc. But what a waste of resources if its value is never realized, the steel could have made surgical instruments or farm equiment or any number of other things and the people invovled in its lifecycle could have been spending their time doing something far more productive. If I can sell it for even a fraction of the original price then that's much better. Sure most people do sell their cars before they are worthless, but what about all that junk? How many have watch perfectly good junk get tossed away and carted off to the dump before even the local homeless population can salvage it?

Finally, realize that the advertising buisness is one that is like the media business with just a few very large companies doing the lions share of all advertising. Even in the classified world that is true. Does it really take a giant national classified adverts company to help people sell to each other? Far from being the most efficient way to do things, I believe its often the least efficient - there's no advertising executives, skyscrappers stuffed full of extraneous staff or three martini lunches involved when A places and ad on CraigsList and B responds to it and buys the item.

I think that people have simply forgotten how to do business with their neighbours and the hidden cost of this is that people have lost their essential feeling of existing in a community that is trustworthy and cares about them. If you can't even get enough trust in your community members to trade a used couch for a few bucks then how can you even think about the more important things in live that require trust? That cost is one that's hard to quantify, but we all, deep down, feel it. The inability to trust our neighbours, to leave cars on the street, our kids with a baby sitter, the feeling of insecurity even at home behind locked doors, the inevitability of graffiti on buildings, disrespect of personal property, and that inevitable tendency to label everyone untrustworthy until they have earned it.

I look forward to a day when community driven services like CraigsList are the norm and when regular businesses will eschew the steady slide to mediocrity because they are tempted by the lure of advertising dollars. For me I'll happily pay for my daily news if its good and free of advertising. I'll happily pay to watch TV shows I like on a per show basis if they are free of adverts and commercial influence, and I'd even happily pay to use Craigslist if he ever feels the need to charge for it.

How the poor have fallen, how have the mighty given?

Tsunami have always fascinated me and I've spent many an hour digging up photos and videos of them. I've always been able to separate the physical event from the death and destruction that they so often wreck. But that is no longer the case having seen the rows and rows of bodies laid out in streets, hospitals, school buildings, in pits for burial. When such numbers of dead are reported piecemeal over weeks, months and years, or abstractly as a statistic its hard to get a grasp on the sheer scale of human misery. The images from around the Indian ocean really bring home the sheer magnitude of destruction the tsunami caused along thousands of miles of coast line. I doubt I'll ever think about tsunami again without those images flashing to the front of my mind.

So I have to say, as the cynic I am, that I was appalled last night that the US had promised $15 million in aid for the countries affected by the tsunami. Immediately I thought about how the USA is spending $1 billion a week in Iraq - that's $142 million a day, and all we can spare is $15 million? Sure those countries are not affluent Western countries, their damages in dollar value may end up been lower than those caused by the last hurricane season in Florida. However the scale of human misery is surely immeasurable by comparison and the US had a great opportunity to demonstrate world leading benevolence with a large and generous donation.

This morning, having clearly endured much criticism from overseas, the US added another $20 million to their donation. That still is clearly a drop in the ocean compared to what is needed. Granted the US is not the only wealthy country in the world, but that donation still only represents about 10 cents per person in our country. How about our government dig deep and find at least $1 per person? And how about we pledge to use all our technological know-how to help the countries around the Indian Ocean to set up a tsunami warning system such as we have protecting our own tsunami vulnerable Pacific shores.

The buoys used to detect tsunami mid-ocean cost about $250,000 each and we operate six in the Pacific. Just think of the difference it would have made if the many hours of warning available had been used to alert the coastal populations in Sri-Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, India and even Africa. What a triumph of technology that could have been and what a tragic failure it was. In this season of giving and good will to all men, not just our people, wouldn't that be the right thing to do?

Love, Poverty and War

My favourite contrarian, Christopher Hitchens, was on the radio this morning talking about his latest book Love, Poverty and War. Although Hitchens can be infuriating to listen to when you disagree with his usually contrarian views, he does make you think. Indeed most of the infuriation comes when you find yourself gently lulled into agreeing with him. At that point you jerk out of it with an angry and indignant start.

Hitchens' is still very much in support of the war - he rarely if ever changes his opinion on things like that. He was criticising "Fahrenheit 9/11", Michael Moore, and of course the liberal left for not supporting the war.

I emailed him a question hoping to draw him out on why he thought it was okay to pursue non-military means to bring down the North Korean regime, but not in Iraq. The question didn't get asked but I suppose his answer would be to repeat his comment that repeated military simulations of an attack on North Korea had predicted an attack on Seoul by North Korean artilery that is located within shelling range, just across the DMZ. But that wasn't my point - he had suggested non-military actions in north Korea to work and would hasten the fall of Kim's regime, so why didn't we just do that to Iraq which by all accounts was just as likely to teeter out of existance in a few years if we'd just stopped boosting Saddam's power by concentrating all our rage on him.

I also wanted Hitchens to say what he thought about what he described as Americas "imperial" aspirations in Iraq. Was that a good thing? Wasn't it more of the same of the awful things we've done elsewhere, especially in South America. My interpretation of Hitchens views is that he believes Iraq is finally a righteous war that the world should have gotten behind. A little late (about ten years), but righteous none-the-less. But if it was really done with the intent of building a democracy in Iraq why didn't Bush say that all along, and why isn't Bush charging ahead full steam against all non-democracies in the world - for instance Saudia Arabia? Why the special and expidited treated for Iraq?

Basically I'd just like to hear Hitchens focus his laser like perception and criticism in some other direction and perhaps come out with something, anything, negative about Bush and his motives for backing of war on Iraq. So far Hitchens seems to be keeping mum on that point - I haven't even heard any criticism of Bush's non-war policies but it could be that I haven't been looking or listening hard enough. Surely Hitchens doesn't think the Bush regime, so representative of its NeoCon backers, is entirely wholesome and wonderful for the world? Or is Hitchens deliberately keeping mum on that point so he can be welcomed deep into the Bush confidence only to later do a contrarian exposee of it?

The only glimmer of hope for something positively negative about Bush was the comment that Richard Perle (who was on the same radio show the day before) wasn't a person that Hitchens would want to spend any time with. Clearly he had some negative feelings or thoughts on Perle, one of the leaders of the NeoCon klan that is pulling the Bush puppet strings. It would be nice to hear some more of his thoughts but unfortunately this wasn't the show to get that opportunity.

Putting money where your mouth is

Mark Morford is suggesting that blue voters express themselves in the way that the red party understands - with their money. So when the going gets blue, the blue go shopping - but only at stores that donated more money to those blue people than those red people. To assist in this goal he points us to Choose The Blue which lists the campaign donations of various corporations under helpful consumer categories like groceries, household and automotic. Buy Blue also has a similar, albeit shorted list, and conveniently sells a bunch of T-shirts to publicize the buy blue campaign.

I'm inclined to agree that putting your consumer dollars where your mouth is can have an effect - corporations are legally obliged to do whatever it is they need to do to preserve shareholder value. If they believe that supporting one party of the other is in their best financial interests then they will - just as Sinclair Broadcasting did. If it can be shown that by doing so they will loose a significant market share and hence revenue and hence stock price then they may find themselves obliged to think again before dabbling in politics. However be warned, this is a quid-pro-quo situation and if blue voters end up shopping only at blue supporting businesses then pretty quickly all the red voters will do the same at their red stores. Since there are arguably more and wealthier red voters at present (if election results are to be believed) then they will win that fight. Once again corporations will argue that while the consumer base is spending with a political motive it is financially best off focusing on the red spenders. That necessarily limits them to about half of the market by people, but not by dollars...

The Buy Blue people make the argument that it will be good for the market to discover there is plenty of room for "blue alternative" stores to corner the market of those who only want to support "blue leaning" corporations. They say that workers will find such businesses better to work at, shoppers will find the workers happier, and communities will reap benefits all around from having more blue stores and fewer red ones. Its a fine theory - I'll sit back and see what happens, if anything. Not shopping at Amazon and Albertsons (a union store) will be hard to accomplish on a day to day basis - as will only buying gas from Shell. Making my next car a Toyota wont be so hard - my previous comments about Toyota and suining California withstanding, as for staying away from Wal-Mart - a piece of cake!

Our dreams

This week I received a nice new black T-shirt from Canada, it reads simply: "Our dreams don't fit on your ballots". Given my last post I think that's a fitting summation of how I feel. I can honestly say I've never voted in my life, except perhaps to select where lunch would be. 37 years on this planet and not a democratic vote to show for it, but I think the T-shirt is the explanation. Ask yourself the question, when you vote are you really feeling like you're voting for your dreams, or just voting against your nightmares?

Anyway, the T-shirt is a promotional item for a new documentary called "The Take". I haven't seen it yet but "The Take" is about workers in Argentina who seized abandoned factories belonging to bankrupt companies. It describes how they started democratic workers collectives to the factories back into production and their subsequent legal battles with the owners who all of a sudden want their factories back. While from a legal perspective you can label the workers as criminals, morally you know you're on their side. They just wanted to be working again and formed companies with the structure that people would work for under the post economic collapse conditions experienced in Argentina. If they had never put the factories back to work can you imagine that the owners would have ever done anything with the derilict buildings? Are the perhaps more interested in seizing on the capital created by pure human spirit?

"The Take" was made by Naomi Klein of No Logo and Ad Busters fame, and Avi Lewis of CBC's "Counter Spin". Watch the trailer in WMV or Quicktime. It will be playing in theaters around North America soon. In the mean time you can buy a T-shirt like me and follow your dreams.

The Power of Nightmares

I recently heard about a new three part documentary by Adam Curtis from the BBC called "The Power of Nightmares". Its subtitle is "The Rise of the Politics of Fear" and that's just what its about. Its basic premis is that two groups have, since the 70's, slowly replaced our age of utopian dreams with an age of nightmares. Those two parties are the Neo-conservative followers of Leo Strauss in the West, and a dedicated group of extremist Islamists in the East.

The followers of Strauss believe that the failure of liberal political parties to deliver on the utopian dreams they promised have left politicians powerless and mere managers of public life rather than true heros and giants of their times. Instead of delivering giant strides in peace, human welfare and great things they declined into mediocrity and servitude of the popular masses. In the East certain groups of Islamists became disgusted with the vision of Western culture and its pursuit of individualistic freedoms over the common good and that of Islam. Furthermore those who joined with democratic institutions were putting the values of the West before those of their religion and could justifiably be eliminated.

What follows in the three hours of "The Power of Nightmares" is a litany of how bit by bit the two sides built their individual cases and discovered that the one thing that could empower their particular vision could be the nightmare scenario that some evil opposition was plotting to eliminate them. From a fictional war against a mythicaly omnipotent world wide conspiracy of terror organistations, to a struggle against the West hellbent on elimating Islam and surpressing their religion and replacing it with Western "freedom".

In the West the politicians discovered the true power that could be delivered by their manufactured nightmare struggles. Initially against the Soviet Union in the cold war, in Afghanistan and later against Islam and the likes of Saddam Hussein and their invented foe Al Qaeda. They found keeping the people permanently in fear of the bogeyman was easier than delivering the dreams they had earlier promised, and coupled with a comforter of religion almost any action in the name of self defence of "freedom" could be justified.

In the East a series of haphazard attempts to further the cause of a Islamic State were pursued setting radicals against governments corrupted by Western money, and radical groups against themselves. Eventually the events leading up to and the response after 9/11 allowed the Islamists to create their own nightmare scenario of unconditional Western aggression against Islam. Any organisation that rejected Western values and religions would now live in fear of elimination by the West, manifest primarily by the actions of the United States.

And so, as the documentary posits, the symbiotic relationship of nightmares in the East and West began and the symbiotic power struggle at the expense of the collected peoples of the East and West ensued.

To me its all very believable, the message goes down very easily - even more so than Fahrenheit 9/11 since it is delivered deadpan and within skiping a breath for lampooning George Bush or Saddam. All parties involved are portrayed as pure cold hearted plotters quietly engineering their way to power with whatever tools that present themselves. Indeed I found the entire premis so easy to swallow and the conclusions so radically transformative that it was like you were Neo in The Matrix and had just stepped out of the rabbit hole that started when you poped the red pill. Except, this is real life, these are true events. Instead of sitting on the cold steel floor of the Nebuchadnezzar you find yourself sitting in your living room contemplating another four years of George W. Bush, his kabal of neo-conservatives and the omnipresent cheerleaders of the fanatical religious right. If in four short years they could invade two countries, squander trillions of dollars of wealth, turn their back on the global opinions of 95% of the world and turn the clock back decades in respect for the environment and human rights, what then could - in the name of fear - they achieve by 2008?

The only solution is for everyone to realize the nightmare is just that, a nightmare. Its something we can all wake up from and leave behind. The global terror networks conspiring to destroy the USA are actually just handfuls of people conspiring to create similar nightmares among their own people. The diciples of fear and loathing are quickly sooth when their prophets are eliminated, and the best thing we can do is just stop listening, refute and shout the "Emperor has no clothes" until the cry is heard the world over. So I urge you, go watch "The Power of Nightmares" by whatever means you can and tell all your friends and have them tell their friends. For obvious reasons this documentary will never bee shown on US TV - its message is even more potent than Fahrenheit 9/11 - but you can easily locate it on the Internet.

To get you started I'll point you to the Information Clearinghouse which has all three parts watchable as a Realmedia stream. Its tiny and with poor audio but the message is the same. Several Indymedia sites have better quality versions, and for full high quality versions you should go download all 1.3GB via the BitTorrent file. If you don't know what BitTorrent is then you should go read this how to and download one of the clients - I recommend the Java powered Azureus client myself. If you're still really stuck, or know me in person I can give you access to the DiVx encoded AVI files or deliver you them on CD along with the appropriate DiVx decoder and player.

Every journey begins with one step

It's one small step for workers in Jonquière, Canada - but its one giant pain in the ass for Wal-Mart. You see folks, over 50% of the Wal-Mart employees in that town have signed union membership cards and they are about to become the first unionized Wal-Mart store - the only one of 5,000 stores. Naturally the Wal-Martians have been up to their usual tricks, most recently by threatening to close the store because its suddenly not economical viable (perhaps because they are blowing all their profits on fighting the unionization in court?).

However it looks like this time it will really happen. Furthermore a handful of other stores throughout Canada are also on the verge of unionizing. Apparently workers unions are also playing hardball in China to stop Wal-Mart preventing unionizing of Chinese Wal-Mart workers. By all accounts they have recently succeeded in this goal.

I just wonder how long it will be before an American Wal-Mart store unionizes? With over 900,000 workers worldwide it could be a huge turning point for the great decline in union memberships in the USA.

Short Light Comedy Time - The Grey Video

The little comic moments that appear in the The Grey Video (22Mb Quicktime) really made me laugh. Courtesy of tech blog Waxy.org.

Drive a hybrid today - enlist now!

As I've previously revealed on this blog, when I was a kid I played soldiers just like all the other kids. Running around with cap guns or a cocked finger (oh er) going "Bang! Bang! You're dead!" was just they way kids did things back then. Back then it seemed like the military had all the cool toys - night vision, lasers, things that went fast, and lots of exploding things for killing people.

Of late it seems like the military is having problems getting anything more advanced than a plain of G.I. Joe on the ground. This was clearly demonstrated yesterday by the uproarious applause after one such G.I. Joe asked why the emperors army has no armour, and why as a result they are having to dig around on scrap heaps for it. I'm lead to wonder what has happened to Spc. Thomas Wilson since that fateful question was asked. The troops clearly loved him, he asked the unaskable for them, but I know people out there who are thinking like this... Surely such a question, embarrassing as it was to Rumsfeld and ipso facto the President, was unpatriotic? And being unpatriotic about the war, its like, not-supporting the troops, and if you're not supporting the troops your supporting those insurgents. Surely, they are thinking, for such an unpatriotic, damaged show of bravado Spc. Thomas Wilson should be taken out around the back and court martialed, or even better sent out armourless to the front?

I expect the military (or more likely Karl Rove) probably have something better lined up for him - "that Wilson boy", they are thinking, "his upper management written all over him". I'll lay money on Wilson turning up in about ten year in the five sided hell hole of "military intelligence" otherwise known as the Pentagon. After ten years stuck behind a desk tracking armour and bullet proof glass production statistics poor Spc. Thomas Wilson will be sorry for all that he ever said and be filled with nothing but love for the government.

By now you're thinking, "Would you just get on with it Gently and give us our phreaking hybrid story!". Well, okay but I promise its connected to the preceding comments.

Just yesterday I was reading about how Toyota of all companies, has joined an auto company led suit against California contesting its CO2 emissions laws. According to the NY Times, the auto companies are claiming that since they have no way to reduce CO2 emissions without reducing fuel consumption, then the laws are effectively state regulation of fuel consumption, which is illegal because only the Federal government can regulate that. Well I say, tough titties - go and invent a gizmo to sequester the CO2 in tail pipe emissions. If the oil production business can do it then so can you.

What I'm particularly upset about is that Toyota, creators of the hugely successful Prius hybrid car, have joined this suit. Even if they stood to gain from it, they could at least have made a stand by not joining it. Its ironic that the Prius is one of the few cars today that would meet California's emission standards, all they have to do is keep up the good work and covert even more of their fleet to hybrid technologies. Lets face it, the auto maker corporations are in the unique position to stay "f**k it, lets all make only hybrids and save the planet from global warming - they'll thank us for it later". But, no they wont do that until they are forced to, or because there is money to be made doing it and right now there is still money to be made not doing it.

So, not only is Toyota suing California, so are General Motors, Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, BMW, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Porsche and Volkswagen. That leaves only Honda and Nissan out on the side-lines for now, although both of them say they oppose the California regulations. Unfortunately that leaves just about no car company at all to buy a fuel efficient car from that isn't busy opposing emissions regulations that might force them to do it. Sigh.

Having read this story I joked to Agent J that with all the other auto makers in the dog house we'd probably end up waiting for Hummer to build a hybrid for us to drive. Knowing how much we both loath that behemoth it seemed like a particularly cruel twist of fate we'd have to endure. But you know, fate delivers her cruel twists in double-quick time these days. So with out further ado, let me introduce to you...

The diesel hybrid humvee

Yes folks, Military.com is reporting that those frightfully clever folks in the Defense Department have decided the best way to get all those danged tree hunging left-liberals to enlist is to give them a nice hybrid armoured Humvee to drive. Called the Shadow RST-V it uses half the fuel per mission that the classic gas guzzling hummer does, can drive up to 20 miles in electric stealth mode (ideal for appreciating the finer points of "Ride of the Valkyries" that you are blasting from the sound system), and has over 100hp of electric power to boost the 138hp diesel engine.

What particularly pisses me off is that I've been wondering for ages where all the diesel hybrids are. If you have a diesel engine you can shove organically produced, CO2 neutral vegetable oils into it, and have great gas mileage. Its the ideal solution so long as you can get a grip on the particulate emissions, a problem that surely someone, somewhere has solved and just isn't letting on. Then you don't even need a hydrogen economy, or solar and wind power with tons of batteries. Just clean safe home grown vegetable oil delivered straight to the door with your groceries (okay I know, WebVan is dead now).

Why is it the military (it turns out the project was co-sponsoured by DARPA, who also brought us the Internet) gets to create and drive around diesel hybrids and Joe Public doesn't? So, if you wanna drive a diesel hybrid before the Germans, you'd better enlist now!^*

^* See, I told you I'd get around to the point eventually

Homeland insecurity

The Bush government has an Orwellian tendancy to name its bills to be the opposite of what they really are, like the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, the Clean Skies Initiative and now the Clean Water Act. All these acts promise one thing and deliver another, but like household products, if the label looks good people buy it. Over breakfast today I mentioned the idea that "they" should just bite the bullet and rename their government departments in the same spirit.

So, the Department of Homeland Security becomes the Department of Homeland Insecurity ensuring that we all feel insecure 24/7. The Department of Defence becomes the Department of Agression, no explanation required there. A few agencies will keep their name but trade roles - the FDA will concentrate on keeping legal drugs from overseas out of the country to protect our drug company monopolies, the DEA will stay the DEA but with the role of ensuring everyone takes their drugs (see THX1138).

But for a few name changes I think we're pretty much there already. When did the defence department actually do anything to defend us? For the two hostile attacks on American soil in the last hundred years (9/11 and Pearl Harbour) they were strangely caught napping. Doesn't today's attack in Saudi Arabia just go to show that even the most heavily defended areas on this planet are still vulnerable and that back in the US of A Homeland Security is surely a myth worthy of celebrating with its own national holiday? We can all have another day of turkey and heavily armed charity workers can loiter outside supermarkets ringing a bell and handing out free nail clippers and knitting needles...