Technical interlude: now faster, stronger, longer

As of today instead of being hosted on my server at home with its piddly 600kbps upstream link, this blog is now hosted with a company called DreamHost. So hopefully you should find pages loading much faster and thanks to a 140GB per month bandwidth quota there is less reason to fear the coming of the great SlashDot because that's about 4,000,000 page loads of your average 30k blog entry. If I ever get that many page hits in a month the Google ad revenue should more than compensate for the bandwidth overages. Finally with over 2Gb of storage I should be able to keep blogging from a long, long, time...

I heard about DreamHost through a friend and although their management UI is a little funky they do have some great features, especially an automated backup system that makes it easy to recover your files. Combined with their base package including 3 domains and much more bandwidth and storage than comparably priced hosting I'm pretty pleased so far. The only thing I'll ding them on is spam filtering for email - it doesn't seem to be that configurable and just doesn't work the way I like it (I'm a realtime blackhole list kind of guy if you must know). However, since no one ever sends me email at this domain I don't really care, and I'm going to assume it will get better in the future because ultimately every hosting company finds that spam is their problem to solve as it eats up their bandwidth and profits.

The never ending lies

Wow, I just did a check and discovered that the Plame/Novak/??? story has been going almost as long as this blog - I first wrote about it in October 2003 following a tip-off from Chicken Or Beef?. Back then, from day one I flamed:

... Bush got Novak to do it himself personally, and Novak will never have the balls to incriminate Bush while he is still in power. You can bet your life as soon as Bush is out of the White House Novak will be fessing up, or writing a book about it, or maybe collecting a handy payoff somehow for keeping his mouth shut.

So I'm pleased to hear that the evidence pointing to the liar-in-Chief is really mounting up. Thom Hartmann wrote yesterday in his TreasonGate piece that the file about Plame was on Air Force One with Bush and Powell and likely as not the leak of the info to Novak or Rove came directly from the top. Now that phone logs from Air Force One have been subpoenaed perhaps it's only a matter of time before something happens. Even better the information about Plame was definitely marked secret (Hartmann says "Top Secret").

Will Bush weasel out of this simply by declaring some vital, incriminating piece of information "top secret" on the grounds of national security? After all, incriminating the President would surely damage the US reputation... well, that's one way of looking at it. Another way would be to say "at last, they've realized that guy is no good and will find someone knew". But of course that someone would be Cheney. Could it be that this was some insane NeoCon game all along - Bush has become too useless, too much of an embarrassment, so we'll just get him out and get our blood brother Cheney in in his place?

The alternative is they'll find a way to draw this out for another two years after which election '08 will be well under way and the spotlights will be focusing on the next batch of Presidential nominees. With their famously short spanned and frivilously focused attentions, that'll be the death of the issue in the mainstream. But that's a long two years for old draft dodger in chief to continue to dodge the impeachment bullet with his name on it.

Yo!

Well of course I had to go and Google open source religion only to find that according to Wikipedia since 1998 a group of people calling themselves Yoans have been working on the concept. I have to say, after a cursory inspection of their website I'm generally in tune with their concepts.

I'm not sure I really like the way they have co-opted (perhaps recycled is a better description) terminology like god (it's us stupid), heaven (only to be found on earth if we can make it happen) and saints (Saint Albert and Saint Issac to name a few). I assume the intention is to use terms that are instantly familiar to a wider audience making Yoism easier to get your head around. Too some it may smack of Republican co-opting of phrases like "clear skies" and "healthy forests" and "no child left behind" to be something completely contrary to the usual interpretation. That's not entirely fair since the Yoan versions of God and heaven are more like a distant cousins to the mainstream ones than the antithesis.

But I do think they carry the Christian analogies a little too far at times, such as in their "Book of Yo" where the section Reclaiming GOD "A story of creation" reads more like a parody of the bible, which is somewhat disingenuous. Actually I'm pretty sure it is supposed to read like a parody of the bible but it'll take a pretty enlightened non-Yoan mind to see the humor clearly for what it is. None the less reading that would probably alienate Christian readers who would find it blasphemous - if they hadn't already written off the concept of Yo as worshiping a false idol.

Actually when I can get my head around the terminology it actually makes a whole lot of sense as a way of life and of rationalizing my vestiges of early Christian (well Anglican Church of England which is about as wishy-washy non-committal Christian as you can make it) and then later scientific upbringing at the Church of Physics (aka Oxford University School of Science). Is that useful to me? To have a "religion" (as opposed to "faith") to identify with? Well as Agent J found out yesterday sometimes people are just too damned nosy about what religion you are and what church you go to. To say I'm Yoan would at the very least solve that problem although I might hazard a guess it would generate more questions than it answers.

As best I can tell the Yoans are not up to much these days. They got some publicity at the start of 2004 but there's been very little activity from them since. However another group called the Universalists Movement seems to be getting some weight behind it, a write up in the New York Times certainly helped. Universalists put ones personally discovered truths first, believing that only you can interpret the truths you discover in life. Their main goal is the pursuit of truths through personal experience. You are free to believe in God with a capital 'G' so long as you are doing so based on your own the truths, not simply because you have faith that God exists, i.e. that someone just told you so.

So while Universalism can encompass people who believe in God and describe themselves as a "religion" its on quite strict terms. Outside of those terms they quite clearly declare themselves as anti-faith, and hence find it abhorrent that faith is being used via government to define and control personal freedoms of the populace at large. The Universalists don't declare themselves as Democrats in the US political arena - they believe that many libertarians and hence many Republicans should support their goal of opposing faith based religions and its influence on the populace at large.

I'll be interested to see if the Universalists just fizzle out like the Yoans, or if they can actually find themselves attracting disenchanted people of faith. Both these religions, without the promise of afterlife or the belief in some omnipotent but essentially good supreme being, they face an uphill battle for winning the hearts and minds of mainstream believers. They have little to ofer those that would traditional use a religion as a catch-all comforter for those spritually cold and bleak days when you just want to curl up and be kept warm by the thought that God is good and God is right there up on his cloud looking out for you^*.

^* Even if he did just smite your car, your home, your health, or your family

Copycat bombings?

Hearing early this morning about more bombings in my home country this morning I was waiting to find out how bad it was. So far there has not been a single report of casualties which is a relief. But the more I read about this new spate of chaos in London the more its sounding like some group of wannabe terrorists who got together to cause some chaos with copycat bombings. I wouldn't even be surprised if this was totally unrelated to any known terrorist groups at all and the explosives were more of the homebrew fertilizer bomb variety planted by a bunch of out of control pranksters.

Why would anyone do such a thing? Well, just to stroke their egos and fuel their delusions of power, and most likely to stirr the pot a bit and increase East-West tensions - just like in Northern Ireland where the IRA eventually found themselves competing with all kinds of thugs (on both sides) determined to keep the choas going and divisive climate of hatred alive.

Da Vinci Code and open source religion

I was reading the blog of someone I was having a business meeting with and he mentioned he generally doesn't read books less than 50 years old based on the theory that anything really good will still be well known and widely read in 50 years. For this reason he eschews popular shelf busters like "The Da Vinci Code". I guess if he lives to be eighty something he may yet get to read it - it'll be interesting to see what makes the cut as popular literature of the early 21st.

I have also not read the D.V.C. and probably never will, but last night I discovered that I may well be able to get away with just seeing the movie. I think the news that it is being made into a movie is quite old now, I vaguely recall it. However going into see "Charlie and the chocolate factory" (two thumbs up by the way) I wasn't expecting to see a poster for Da Vinci Code proudly pronoucing its roll out in May 2006, in fact I note they even already have a trailer for it online! Isn't 10 months in advance just a little early to be lauching a publicity campaign for a flick that is surely going to be plenty controversial and an instant hit in its own right?

And I do relish that controversy - I'm sure there will be scads of people trying to boycott the movie and remind people that its all just a story. But (if my smattering of information about the books plot and central premise is correct) it will be a great opportunity to spread some skepticism about how squeaky clean the early history of the church is, and will maybe lead a few more people to question, just a little bit, how far organized religion has come from the central premise of Jesus' teachings - be nice to each other and enjoy your life on this hunk of oh-so-pretty rock while you still have it. After all isn't that a concept (of being nice to each other) that should be freely available, freely practiced and also free as in beer? And aren't many of the mainstream churches just organizations that want to restrict you, and tithe you, to practice their particular interpretation of that concept, one that Jesus basically gave away for nothing, no strings attached?

So in my interpretation Jesus was the original free software kind of guy for religion where the source code "be nice to each other" was made free as in free speech, and also free as in beer. That clearly pissed a lot of people and extant organizations who previously off, they previously had a monopoly on such things and were damned if they were going to let people doing their own thang for free. Hence they spent the next 2000 years trying to clear up the problem and stamp out any remaining bastions of free and self-driven religiosity that came out of the original free religion foundation (aka Christianity) such as gnositicism. Religion, they belived, just like air, water, and pleasure were surely things that were ripe for monopolizing and certainly shouldn't be left un-monetized.

At this point if my scant knowledge of the Da Vinci Code is way off then that will all sound like a ridiculously off-topic rant - in which case I guess I can just wait to see the movie and find out what it is really all about. However I hope my concept of Jesus as an open source kind of guy reinventing religion as something to be freely available and free to practice in the face of entrenched and fiercely protective monopolies of power, and belief systems at least makes some sense. And we all know what the result of the struggle was - a few heavily commercialized brands constantly waging a war of publicity and recruitment against each other, something like Eurasia, Oceania and Eastasia while their practitioners are for the most part "enjoying" a never ending downward spiral - which doesn't bode at all well for today's free software movement if that is also their destiny.

Put your money where your marriage is...

There's and interesting piece over at Alternet about a new book on the instituition of marriage. From the description it seems there are two main pointsl. Firstly that marriage as it is being sold today is a relatively new concept and many of the supposed "anti-marriage" concepts are also very old ones. Secondly that apart from all its pro-marriage rhetoric, the stupid white men dejour (aka the Republic party) area doing little, if anything to actually support the institution of marriage.

In fact, by my reading, the inference is that the massive decrease in marriage longevity (with divorce rates averaging 50% or more) has more to do with the increasing financial strains on the "economically challenged" majority, than with a decline in moral values or lack of faith in marriage as a fine institution. The author points out that up until 200 years ago marriage is most frequently entirely arranged, and more to the point arranged for maintainence, or acquisition of financial status. Now today with people in the west choosing partners for the most part on a free will basis, quite often with partial or even no support of either family network the financial strains of every day throw those of married life into harsh reality. Indeed isn't it said that one, if not the, most important factor in causing marital strain is money issues?

So in today's society where there is more often than not no free childcare from the grandparents, both partners are going out to work to earn a crust to keep their heads above the water and maybe a roof over their heads, and increasingly one or both partners is also trying to support children from another marriage - well is it any wonder divorce rates are through the roof? Yes, if anyone really wanted to put their support for marriage is then they should really be providing free childcare, fixing the heinous situation that has lead to 45 million Americans without any health insurance (thank you WalMart), and generally getting back to the situation where a family - even if its just the two of you - means something more than "a combined economic shopping entity united by credit card debt and cellphone bill".

Polling in the USA

Matt Taibbi takes and infuriated look at polling in the United States. In it he makes an interesting discovery - that before the invasion of Iraq only 40% said they strongly supported it, another 40% supported it "either out of deference to the president or a sense of patriotism." Now after the invasion has gone horribly, horribly wrong 53% think it was "a mistake", which means 47% still think it was a good idea. As Matt points out, you can probably assume that means the 40% who thought it was a great idea before, still think its a great idea, and only 7% of the lemmings are still supporting the war. This really pisses him off. To cite his best words on the issue:

Which invites the question: If these people can't handle a few bad headlines, what exactly was their level of commitment to begin with? Pre-war polls, confined to the standard Coke-Pepsi either-or formula, didn't tell us much about that.

Maybe if the polls back then had been conducted differently, we might have had different results. Imagine a March 2003 poll that posed the following questions:

• Would you yank your son out of college and send him to die for this bullshit?
• Would you yourself be willing to give your life for this cause? If yes, grab your shit; there's a bus outside.

Those should be the only kinds of polls we allow, when it comes to questions of war. I mean, who the hell are these people who changed their minds once the news started to turn sour? There are only two explanations: They're either unbelievable cowards, or they didn't think it through. In either case, if there were any justice, they would all be rounded up and dumped buck-naked on the streets of Fallujah.

So basically he's making the point that people made up their minds about war as if they were voting for their favourite soda, or something equally banal. When it became clear that a war might actually have some consequences for them a lot of those 40% ended up flip-flopping. Concluding Matt writes:

But for all the poll respondent's smug airs, he only talks tough when he's in a crowd, and shielded by anonymity, identified only by his number. I've seen this myself as a journalist. Interview someone on the street, and he loves to hold forth and waste your time giving you his great opinion. But ask for his name for the record, and he runs away like a bitch.

A nation that indulges in anonymous casual cruelties like The Swan should not be consulted in the same manner before a war. In matters of life and death, stand up and be counted -- by name, swearing on the blood of your children. What kind of country goes to war whispering "yes" into a telephone?

I couldn't agree more!

Exxon, the externalizing machine

Did you know that sixteen years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill Exxon has still not paid up any of their $5 billion in damages? Alternet's story The True Price of Oil tells how Exxon is saving itself $400 million every year it delays even though its being charged 6 percent annual interest on the judgement. Not paying earns Exxon an estimated 14 percent return on capital, so they choose to delay as long as possible - the cummulative effect is to have saved them enough money to pay the entire $5 billion judgement.

The Alternet article also tells of how fines for oil spills are just a cost of doing business, and not paying those fines is just a way to avoid paying any of those costs while all the time external entities (the environment and the surrounding society) bare the cost. This is the perfect definition of externalizing your costs and makes Exxon a king of externalizing. If everyone paid the true cost of oil at the pump we'd never fill up - estimates of these subsidies go over $1000 per driver per year, around $20 per week, and that was before the Iraq war started which has probably increased that figure by 50% or more.

And while I'm on the subject of oil - I read last week that Toyota had been telling all the owners of its electric RAV4 SUV that their cars would be taken back and crushed at their end of current leases. They claim they cannot afford the cost of liability for the cars and maintaining spares inventories. The State of California has apparently twisted their arms asking them to offer California leasers the opportunity to retain their vehicles in return for a release of liability and spares supply commitments. This phenomenom of crushing electric cars is apparently rife - there's even a DontCrush.com web site with letters from owners wanting to save their cars, and photos of crushed electric cars.

I have previously heard a different theory of why car manufacturers are so eager to avoid pure electric cars on the road. Contrary to their claims they have turned out to be extremely reliable. Powered by electric motors their have far fewer moving parts and need very little maintenance. The knock on effect is less money for the manufacturers in supply spares, and far less money for dealers servicing cars. No oil changes are needed to drag buyers back to the money pit forcing dealers to sell and forget, or pray the car goes wrong. But ask yourself - how often do you service your washing machine - maybe once every few years, or even less? Electic motors just last and last - all you ever need to replace is the brushes which are inexpensive items. Thanks to regenerative braking you'll also put a lot less wear and tear on the brake pads. Really all you have to do with an electric car is replace the tyres once in a while and wash it - they are effectively like a razor with an everlasting blade, or an inkjet printer with bottomless ink cartridges. Is it any wonder car companies want them off the road?

Can anyone say "dot com" over again?

A recent Chrisitian Science Monitor article pretty much sums up how insane the real estate market is getting in the USA, and perhaps even globally. When people are using chocolate clad women in bikinis to sell unbuilt condos there must surely be something up. I mean, as far as end of the bubble omens go that really has to beat getting stock tips from shoe shine boys, right? The only thing this over-hyped and over-here bubble lacks is a catchy monica. How about "brick com", or even "brick con"? However if overseas investors keep pouring their bucks into this country (and then sucking them out later) it may just keep the pot boiling for a few more years.

I begin to wonder how much the real-estate boom is fueling the "economic recovery" in the USA? I'll bet its quite a significant factor - some friends of my who are appraisers said this month they've seen a record number of people getting foreclosed because they re-fied their properties to the max and spent all the money on household goods like home entertainment systems and new cars - all stuff that depreciated faster than it becomes obsolete.

Also being surrounded by new condo developments under construction I'd love to see some statistics on how many housing units are lying empty now, compared to during the stock market boom days. Certainly back then it seemed you couldn't buy or rent property for love nor money. However now there seems to be a real surfiet of rental property at well below the cost of paying the mortgage on the same space if you bought it. That leads me to believe their must be a lot of vaccant properties that have been bought as investments with the owners banking on increasing prices that will cover the money they are sinking into mortgage interest payments.

In California and other areas people make the case that the hottest markets are those where land is scarce and the population is growing. In these places the law of supply and demand will ensure that prices keep going, going, up! However the point is that prices are going up faster than wages and sooner or later pretty much everyone will get to the point where they can no longer afford to move anywhere but out of the State, into a smaller property (why bother?) or just not buy anywhere at all and start renting until prices fall again, or wages rise to exceed prices.

Template tidy up and introducing shameless advertising by Google

In a fit of idleness I spent a bit of time today tidying up the template for this blog, I even added a logo - like it? I also went down the list of links and noted that a good third of the blogs I'd been linking too seem to have vanished. I'm always amazed at how many people who have blogged away for some significant amount of time then just let their site die completely. I wonder if these people have actually been required to remove their sites or maybe they ceased to be and the hosting and domain registration fees no longer got paid? For my own part I intend to keep this site up, even if I stop blogging for an extended period. But that begs the question - even if I could prepay hosting for, say a hundred years, just how far into the future will a web site remain accessible? What is the longevity of the HTTP protocol and today's HTML formats?

You may also note some Google ads down the left side - yes in the long dark tea-time of the soul anything is possible, even selling your soul to shameless advertising. What better way to plumb the depths of darkness? As it happens this venture is largely to justify paying for some of the aforementioned "professional" hosting so that hopefully any time soon LDTT will be available at much greater download speeds. Also I will no longer have to live in fear of a time called "the coming of the great SlashDot". No word yet on how long this will be, but it could be "real soon now".

Actually it's been kind of interesting to see what ads Google does spew into the left margin, and rather gratifying that when it has nothing better it falls back on Hitch-hikers Guide stuff which hopefully with end up, by the fundamental interconnectedness of things, putting a few pennies into the estate of the late, great Douglas Adams. And remember, even if you think advertising sucks our souls and wastes our money (by adding an intangebile "marketing" mark-up to everything we buy) don't forget that it only sucks your soul if you actually click on something and buy it. It remains to be seen when some bright spark will get the idea of creating a massively prolific virus that turns millions of PCs into ad-clickers and makes someone, or everyone, richer than sin - or at least richer than most advertising executives. Perhaps then the advertising industry will then see the folly of web advertising and give it a rest, or... more like the consequence of such a virus would be to force you to supply a biometric identity verification every time you click on an advert. I wonder just how popular that will be?

In the mean time if you want a completely ad-free Tea-Time experience just use one of the many feed readers such as Bloglines to subscribe to it. If you regularly read more than one blog its really the only way to keep up and will save you from visiting a whole bunch of web sites every day to see if they have been updated. Judging from the site statistics it looks like most of the 50 or so people visiting this web site every day (as opposed to reading the feed) are arriving here from Google searches anyway, so it wont be a big impact on anyone.

Finally, if you're feeling really benevolent then go ahead, make my day (or at least pay for my tea) and click on a few of the advertising links, even better do a search and then click on some links - that seems to be even more lucrative. I promise all revenues will be ploughed back into keeping this blog and me alive.

Start your own class action lawsuit

Did you ever wonder how all those class action suits get started? Did you ever wonder if the person who first thought of the suit gets more than all the other class members who probably get a few bucks each (or as in my case a $.27 refund from American express - which since I no longer have account with them will cost them many times more to send to me as a check than its value). And did you ever think all those other class action suits were over completely lame things, and that the really important corporate wrongs that are bothering you just aren't getting acted on by anyone?

Well now you can trundle over to Lawyers and Settlements and type in your pet class action gripe and see if one of their pack of hungry lawyers wants to make a case out of it. It will also help you find current class action suits that you can join - from faulty body armour to blindness caused by viagra. Then sit back and wait for your handout like the rest of us. Come to think of it where is that Microsoft class action suit rebate I was supposed to get?

Abortion - killing us softly?

The Wall Street Journal article The Empty Cradle will Rock and LA Times article Confront Abortion Anew make the case that the prevalence of abortion amongst the democratic leaning part of the US population is destined to cause the demise of that population segment. Effectively the red-staters are out-breeding us to death by bringing more babies to full term - an idea I've heard many times before, but not in relation to abortion rates, just declining birth rates among Democrats in general.

Basically it seems to indicate that the "pro-choice meme" is inherently memetically inferior - it is doomed to extinction in the fullness of time, assuming of course that voting based on your religious preference is not outlawed on the basis that it violates separation of church and state. And if you can figure out how that ever could be implemented you're a better person than I. I think US democrats could do well to look to Europe where religion and politics or government just isn't an issue that anyone gives a second thought about and without any rules that preclude its influence. It does appear that European society was at one time much more religiously influenced all the way to the top hence the process of their transition to a largely secular society might have some lessons for democrats to learn from.

Could this abortion rate theory be another explanation why the Republicans are so eager to grab the vote of the mostly Catholic and hence decidedly anti-abortion Latino segment, as well as their own home grown baby booming segment, the Baptists? Have Republicans just become neocon baby snatchers - they don't just want your vote they want your baby's vote! Stay tuned for Republican propoganda tell us that having babies is patriotic and those barren or baby-free couples are un-patriotic, as it happens you can already buy the T-shirts...

A short expensive breakfast-time

Did you ever wonder why breakfast cereal is so danged expensive? Its a question I've often thought about when perusing the cereal isle. The only explanation I'd ever heard was that cereal is just so bulky its expensive to transport, store and takes up a lot of shelf space. But hey so is toilet paper and all kinds of cheap-n-bulky stuff. So after putting away a bowlful of the light and crunchy stuff this morning I thought I'd actually google the same issue and see what anyone else thought or had found out about the issue.

According to one article the issue of cereal prices is something that has been investigated by various government agencies many times before, and not once has the charge of over-charging or price fixing stuck. To me this all sounds like all the investigations of gasoline prices - lots of huffing and puffing but never much conclusion. The one thing that never seems to get communicated to the public after them is a clear and simple breakdown of where all the $5 a box goes to. I feel like such info should be readily be available, and on the tips of peoples tongues when they are trying to choose between brand name and no-name cereals.

The article goes on to conclude that the issue of high cereal prices is basically a myth, which to me sounds ludicrous - we've all seen no-brand cereals that are very significantly cheaper than the gammut of branded cereals so what gives? Can the brand guys really claim that the difference is entirely due to advertising costs? Of course not, they'll tell you they have a superior product, something that in many cases is difficult to say for sure. Furthermore it would seem the price premium placed on that quality improvement is usually far beyond the actual cost.

Another article I found referenced a 1993 magazine article on the "cornflake cartel" which estimated the raw ingredient cost of a box of cereal at just 6% of the total price. This should give you an idea of how specious the premium ingredient claim would be. Say the manufacturer used a premium ingredient costing twice the normal price - it would only add an extra 6% to the total price. Yet in reality the difference between premium and no-brand cereals is often more like 25 to 50%. That's a pretty high markup. Can you really believe that you're actually paying a $2 or more per box just for advertising costs? But then again I would say that even the cheap no-brand products seem extremely pricey given their raw material costs. We know that cereal grains are a vastly overproduced commodity, so much so that the government has to subsidize its production just to make it worth farmers while to grow it. And a box of puffed up and pulverized corn probably has just a handful of corn in it. Shouldn't it be basically about $1 a box? At that price I could buy it with impunity and worry about the real cost... there has to be a real explanation of why breakfast cereal quantitatively and qualitatively feels like a big over-puffed, over priced rip-off.

Anyway, having thought and blogged about this I'm coming to the conclusion that probably almost no one cares. When people are willing to drop $3 or more for a cup of coffee or $5 for a bucket of pop-corn why should they care about spending $5 for a box of cereal that will give them at least a half-dozen cheap and crunchy breakfast meals? The only people who I think will give a damn about it are those with lots of kids to feed and those growing millions at or below the poverty line who really can't afford to pay top-dollar for cereal. I guess the answer then is to buy bulk oatmeal (I've seen it in 50lb bags for less than 75 cents a pound) and send the kids to school with a stomach full of porridge - just like I got when I was a kid. Mmmmm, porridge... the cornerstone of a hearty Scottish breakfast, how appropriate as a low cost alternative to overpriced cornflakes and the like.

Its not called "Great" for nothing

Having spent most of the morning watching BBC News for obvious reasons, I noticed all the bystanders and victims they were interviewing were exhibiting characteristically British stoicism. Hence I liked the quote from an AP news report where British tour guide Michael Cahill says, "Its Great Britain - not called 'Great' for nothing". Exactly.

Although Blair has variously being called Bush's butt-boy, puppet, lapdog etc. etc. I was so pleased his speech today didn't include anything about telling the British people get back to business as usual and go shopping. Of course if he was to have given the British any direction at all it would have been to go home and have a nice cup of tea, which being a warm drink is good for shock. One of my earliest memories is being dragged out of a car wreck and being forced to drink scalding hot tea. Note to British parents - make your shock therapy tea warm and sweet.

LOL

Stories like the Russian astrologer suing NASA for upsetting the natural balance of forces in the universe pretty much define the term LOL, in fact it pushed me to the brink of ROFLMAO I would really like to know how they intend to prove it has upset the natural balance of forces in the universe. Furthermore I wonder how the are planning to distinguish any human activity from those skyward bound. After all the energy unleashed by Little Boy or even daily by combustion of petroleum completely dwarfs the impact of a washing machine sized hunk of metal into poor old Comet 9P/Tempel 1. Indeed before 1867, long after the "invention" of astrology, no one even knew of its existence, so how could astrologers have ever accounted for its influence into their astrological predictions?