You don't have to be more than marginally awake to have noticed that some of the biggest war cheerleaders in politics are people who have never been anywhere near a battlefield. It is also interesting to note that most of those people are also unwilling to see any of their descendents participate in war activities either.
People regarded as cheerleaders without any record of participation were dubbed "chickenhawks" a while back, and the term has now entered the US lexicon as short-hand for a person whose views lack credibility because their life philosophy seems to be based largely on "do as I say".
Dalton Trumbo, who was one of the "Hollywood Ten", writers blacklisted because of their refusal to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, wrote a screenplay for the movie "Johnny Got His Gun" in 1971 that pretty much nails the whole war cheerleader ethos to the wall. Here is the quote:

You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else's life. They're plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That's their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead.
Hmmmm.
But what do the dead say?
Nobody but the dead know whether all the things people talk about are worth dying for or not. And the dead can't talk. So the words about noble deaths and sacred blood and honor and such are all put into dead lips by grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak for the dead. If a man says death before dishonor he is either a fool or a liar because he doesn't know what death is.

Link: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hCUJ8DMdnA_MhoWJPorTaj3WtWPQD8VVOJ180

The last few weeks have been brutal for the airline industry in the US. On top of Aloha and Skybus going bankrupt, and the merger (long planned) between Delta and NorthWest, I just read that Frontier Airlines has filed for Chapter 11 protection after a creditor started yanking its chain.
The fuel price escalation, plus the general recession, is going to cause yet more grief in the US airline sector before the end of this year.

Over the past few months we have seen rapid rises in food prices (and the prices of other commodities) worldwide. Not only that, but we are now seeing food shortages, with some countries restricting or eliminating exports of foodstuffs.
A large number of column inches has been devoted to discussion of the root causes of the price escalation. A lot of fingers have been pointed at the US corn ethanol marketplace as a driver of food price increases, on the grounds that this is an artificial market created in an attempt to reduce US dependence on oil imports.
I have been looking for blogs that engage in substantive discussion of these issues from an informed perspective. Here is one such blog.

Link: http://www.profootballtalk.com/2008/04/08/leinart-issues-dmca-demand-over-champagne-photo/

By now, football fans have probably heard of the publication of a bunch of photos of Matt Leinart, a quarterback for the Arizona Cardinals, cavorting with a bunch of young women in a "party situation".
The photos in question originally generated controversy because of allegations that some of the women might be under legal drinking age (21 in the United States). How on earth the photos could prove that one way or another is a mystery to me.
The fact that a young NFL quaterback regularly parties with young women should be a shock to nobody. However, Matt Leinart might want to read up on the history of other young quarterbacks and their behaviour when they entered the NFL. While Joe Montana and John Elway were keeping a low social profile and letting their throwing and game management skills do the talking on the field, Cade McNown, a first round draft pick a few seasons ago, apparently spent a significant amount of time hanging out with the bunnies at the Playboy Mansion in Chicago. Last time I looked, he was out of football after being dumped out of the NFL, his brief career judged to have been a bust.
What is more bizarre is that a lawyer representing Leinart is now threatening websites who published the photos with legal action under the DMCA. He sent a threatening letter to ProFootball Talk, whose owner Mike Florio happens to be a lawyer by trade. Florio was unimpressed by the threat, and he explains the background, the threat letter itself and a conversation with the lawyer here.
Apart from the fact that ProFootball Talk did not actually publish the photos (it merely linked to them), the threat to the website smells of a try-on. For a start, copyright to the pictures initially resides with the photographer, not the subject. Unless Leinart has purchased the copyright from the photographer, he and his lawyer have no legal basis for any DMCA demand. Since the letter to Profootball Talk did not specify that copyright is claimed by Leinart, that reinforces my belief that the letter is a try-on.
However, the bigger picture here is that either Leinart has a fool for a lawyer, or the lawyer has a fool for a client. If you have been photographed cavorting with young women and the pictures are in the public domain, trying to have them suppressed is a pointless exercise, since the genie is out of the bottle. Not only that, but the attempt to suppress them ensures that the story will continue to gain traction and attention. Absent any legal action, the media would lose interest and most readers would probably move on with the rationalization that "boys will be boys".
Threatening legal action on dubious grounds against an NFL news site run by a lawyer is really, really dumb, since it ensures continual airplay for the story, and will allow more people to continue to ask the question of whether Matt Leinart, to use an old phrase, has a million-dollar contract married to a ten-cent head. At the time when he should be keeping a low profile and winning the job of quarterback, he appears to be also carelessly whooping it up with people of dubious merit, and the resulting publicity is threatening to become the main story about him. For at least one party, he appears to have done the equivalent of inviting a guy with a telephoto lens to a nudist colony, and only now, when the resulting pictures are all over the internet, is his lawyer sending try-on threat letters to the media. Dumb, dumb, and dumber.

Link: http://dailykos.com/story/2008/4/9/92054/68772/600/492655

...the campaign website of Sen. Joseph Lieberman went offline during his re-election campaign for the Senate. At the time, his campaign accused the campaign of Ned Lamont (who ran as the official Democratic Party candidate, having won the primary election) of orchestrating a Denial Of Service attack to crash the website.
Tech-savvy folks everywhere pointed out that (a) Lieberman's campaign was using a hosting company costing $15 a month, which is not indicative of a high-volume high-reliability hosting deal, (b) all of the other sites managed by the hosting company were also offline. The obvious conclusion was that the Lieberman campaign had selected an ISP that could not cope with the level of traffic that was hitting the site.
At the time, the FBI announced an investigation into the allegations of a DoS attack. No detail ever emerged of the findings of the investigation, although it was reported at the end of 2006 that the FBI had failed to find any evidence of tampering by outsiders. More recently, however, via a Freedom Of Information Act request, it has been confirmed that the FBI investigation was terminated with the conclusion that there was no DoS attack of any kind on the web site. The Lieberman campaign allegations were falsehoods, and any tech-savvy internet geek would have concluded that within, ooh, about 30 minutes.
The unanswered question; why did the FBI not determine that the Lieberman campaign should be charged with wasting the time of law enforcement, and when is the Lieberman campaign going to apologize for the false accusations.
I know, I am not holding my breath...

I am a regular user of Yahoo IM (my ID is nostall160). Chatting online is a fascinating process, since one sees all sorts of behaviours online, ranging from the open, friendly and interesting, through to the dour, monosyllabic, rude and duplicitous.
One duplicitous behaviour that I see all-to-frequently is the habit that many people have of apparently logging off of Yahoo immediately after you have sent them a message. I say "apparently" because in all probability, they simply went Invisible because they didn't want to talk to me. I have seen this behaviour persistently from some Yahoo users. It is rather amusing, because it gives away their attitude and intentions immediately. If they wanted to not speak to me, they could set their profile to be Invisible to me, or they could set it to be Invisible to Everybody.
I have become somewhat tired of being given the brush-off and being subjected to duplicitous behaviours like the one outlined above. So, commencing immediately, I am not going to initiate any Yahoo conversations. My Yahoo will show my true status (I will not hide), but I will only respond to conversation initiations. I will not initiate any conversations. I want to see how much effort other folks are prepared to invest in communications with me. I feel that I have been investing too much effort for too little reward. Time for other folks to pick up the slack.
UPDATE - I logged onto Yahoo just now and one person appeared to logoff within seconds...classic case of somebody ducking a conversation, when I had not even tried to initiate one. This person has been doing this persistently for weeks, so I guess that they will have to talk to me in the future...

Link: http://www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/murphy-war.html

...are available here.

Link: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/San_Serriffe/

...we pause for a moment to salute The Guardian newspaper, which in 1977 unleashed one of the great April Fool's Day hoaxes - the fictional island archipelago of San Serriffe. This spawned many April 1st imitators. I remember buying the University Of San Serriffe t-shirt at the time. The university's (Latin) motto: In Perpetuam Floreat Nihil (nothing ever flourishes here). I also bought a t-shirt featuring the likeness of the island's military dictator, General Pica.

Link: http://www.autoweek.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070806/FREE/70803009/1530/FREE

Gordon Murray, the former Technical Director at Brabham F1, and lead designer for several McLaren road cars, has formed a company to design an innovative new city car.

Link: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/amazing-adventures-of-men-with-gold.html

...into the procurement process that led to a contract for up to $300m in value being awarded to a corporation apparently fronted by a 20-something operating out of Miami with no apparent track record in any type of business. The goods being purchased under the contract were ammunition for US and friendly forces in Afghanistan.
Aside from the seemingly negligible qualifications of the company's front man, a lot of the professed amazement centres around revelations that much of the ammunition supplied under the contract came from Eastern European countries, and that much of the ammunition was old (some of it over 40 years old).
Not surprisingly, politicians have snapped into action over this contract, and are convening hearings to question all of the parties involved. Whilst that may be entertaining, it may not reveal very much, since the international arms trade is murky on a good day, and frighteningly obscure and scary on a bad day.
The New York Times is supposedly investigating this contract; however, this blog posting as already turned up some interesting information.
One of the sources of indignation, that the ammunition is old, may not be an issue. If properly stored and handled, much ammunition and explosive material is stable and lasts a long time. When the US Navy re-commissioned the 4 Iowa-class battleships in the 1980's as part of the Reagan-era spending bonanza known as the 600 ship navy, the ammunition and propellants used in the 16 inch main guns of the ships dated from the 1930's, and was used in live firing exercises and some battle action without issues.
This story will run and run. We can look forward to politicians on television asking questions of varying degrees of acuity and usefulness, and we might see some useful output from the NYT investigation, assuming that it is properly executed (but I'm not holding my breath).