This rather scholarly article, written in 2003, before many people had noticed the increased reliance on presidential signing statements, analyzes the recent reliance on this device by sitting presidents.
UPDATE - Since the link appears to be broken, here is a link to an article on the subject by John Dean at FindLaw.

In World War II the UK government built and sank a number of (supposedly temporary) sea forts in the Thames Estuary. One of the forts (HM Tongue Sands) was visible several miles off the shore in my home town of Margate.
In 2007, one of the forts, Sealand was up for sale...the founder, who is old and lives in Spain, having decided to get out of the country management business.
I wrote a detailed document about North Sea forts, using information freely available on the Internet, and gave it to my dad as a Christmas present 3 years ago. I may publish it to this blog if there is interest in making it available.
In the meantime,here is a collection of photos from some of the sea forts.

Link: http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/greatergood/current_issue/keltner.html

...which tends to undercut the long-established conventional wisdom about how to acquire, keep and expand power, many of which derive from the works of Machiavelli.

Link: http://propublica.org/

Via this article at Poynter.org, comes news of the creation of a new investigative journalism organization, ProPublica. The organization is funded by Herb and Marion Sandler, who built up Golden West Financial Corporation in California from 2 branches to one of the largest S&L operations in the country, before selling it and becoming very wealthy in the process.
This articlet at the New York Times provides some insight into how and why ProPublica was created, and the motives of the Sandlers. Some excerpts follow:

Since the late 1980s, the Sandlers used their wealth to finance a variety of nonprofit organizations, including Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union and Acorn, the grass-roots organizers. They helped found the Center for Responsible Lending, where they are among the largest benefactors. They are also among the very few philanthropists in the country who finance basic scientific research, at the University of California at San Francisco. And they have set up nonprofits to conduct research into parasitic diseases and asthma. In 2003, they started the Center for American Progress, which is intended to be a liberal counterweight to the heavyweight policy centers of the right, like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute.

...the Sandlers have a larger vision for what their new organization will accomplish. “They used to tell me that they weren’t really interested in investigative journalism per se,” Lewis says. “But they saw it as a way to make the world a better place.”
Lowell Bergman, a New York Times and “Frontline” contributor who has long been friends with the Sandlers, says much the same thing. “Herb doesn’t like crooks, liars, predatory lenders and lots of other people that you and I wouldn’t like,” he says. “He would like to put them out of business and throw them in jail.”

Link: http://greenbaypressgazette.packersnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080306/PKR01/80306118/1989

The transcript of Brett Favre's retirement news conference in Green Bay is now online here. Leaving aside all of the football-related traffic and commentary elsewhere on the web, what strikes me reading the transcript is how compellingly authentic Brett Favre seems to be as a person and a communicator. Despite pulling down a multi-million dollar salary for a long time, he comes across as quite unaffected by the fame or the money aspect of being a professional sportsperson.
He quite cheerfully admits how hard the decision was, and also that he really has no idea what he will do next. Most retiring players tend to talk up their futures like no tomorrow, possibly because they are frantically trying to cope with the reality that nothing can match what they have experienced in their athletic careers. Favre appears to be under no illusions that his life will be very different. He also admits what many athletes often do not get around to admitting; that the biggest challenge is not always physical, but mental. You can only give so much mental effort before the tank becomes empty. The line "I can still play. I'm not sure I want to" is the clue that for Brett Favre, the mental effort was about to become too much.
The good news is that unlike some other iconic quarterbacks such as Joe Montana and Dan Marino, both of whom played on beyond the point at which they had become physically sub-standard, Brett Favre leaves at the top of his game, on his own terms, and with his physical health seemingly intact. In that respect, he demonstrates a high degree of wisdom; he understands more than many of his fellow athletes when it is time to move on. The NFL and the Packers will miss him more than they know. The rest of us will miss him mainly because, unlike so many other NFL players, he always looked like he was having fun out there. Perhaps that is the underlying key to his retirement; he sensed that if he wanted to stick around, the game was no longer going to be enough fun.

Link: http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2008/03/why_republicans_reject_science.php

This blog posting is an interesting one that attempts to rationalize and explain why so many conservative people in the USA, and the Republican Party, seem to be hostile to science. The debate in the comments section is also relatively sane and non-polemical.

Link: http://www.vilcabambahomes.com/home.html

Here, courtesy of a tip-off from my friend Harriet, is a place that looks to be as green as Hawaii or the Seychelles, and which is close to the Equator...Vilcambaba in Ecquador.

Since my marriage broke up about 18 months ago, I have been engaging with the world of internet dating. There are a number of great advantages to internet dating, the main one being that you can engage in pre-screening of people to ensure that you do not end up meeting with somebody who is unsuitable for you.
There are some disadvantages too. While I have yet to meet with somebody who was totally different to what they claimed, I have met with at least one person that seemed to be on the take, with no idea that interactions between adults usually involve some level of reciprocity.
The main source of amusement and frustration with internet dating is wading through profiles. This is interesting on several levels in what it shows:

1. A very significant percentage of people on these dating sites and forums could not assemble a cogent, coherent collection of sentences if their lives depended on it. Spelling mistakes and poor grammar are everywhere. Sometimes you can infer that the problem originates from the fact that the author's first language is not English, but most people would appear to have no such excuse. I intend to publish some of the most egregious examples in future postings.
2. A very large percentage of women (particularly on mainstream dating sites) create profiles that are largely composed of "fluff" - full of cliches and platitudes about how wonderful they are, how they love family and animals, help old ladies across the road etc. etc. The problem with verbiage like this is that it (a) tells you nothing about the person, and (b) does not differentiate them in any way from the umpteen thousand other profiles out there. I read these profiles and end up thinking "you have told me nothing about yourself".
3. Many people lecture and shout at would-be-suitors. Clearly at some point they had a bad dating experience, and now they are trying to engage in pre-selection. However, when I see a profile written in all caps containing phrases like "NO DEADBEATS, LIBERALS OR TIME-WASTERS", I immediately conclude that this person is determined to never get another date via the internet. They badly need some exposure to the contents of Marketing 101.

Anyway, I will be writing more about this wonderful world in the future.

Link: http://www.bonddad.blogspot.com/

Bonddad has been following the property price collapse and the continuing decline of the dollar on his blog.
The town of Vacaville appears in one of his recent blog postings - this town was the subject of a prior posting of mine about property price declines in California.
The situation in parts of the USA is shaping up to be a re-run of the early 1990's in the UK, when property prices fell dramatically in the high-price areas of the country, leaving many borrowers (including me) under water. The good news was that prices eventually recovered, but it took 6 years before I moved back into positive equity. I did not walk away, partly because I could afford the mortgage (even though it was originally a joint mortage with my wife) and partly because I had equity invested in the property from the beginning. As Bonddad's posting about Vacaville shows, when you have little or none of your own money invested, walking away from a negative equity situation begins to look like a rational strategy. I expect to see a lot of property owners walking away in the next 12-18 months, particularly if they have an extended family that they can go live with.
Speaking personally, I intend to keep renting here in Dallas for a while, as I accumulate saving and investment money for when the market recovers. As somebody observed a long time ago, they are not making any more land, so I may invoke my long-term plan to buy a land parcel and start work on an Earthship...

Link: http://papersplease.org

This website, founded by civil libertarian and EFF co-founder John Gilmore, itemizes the attempts to fight an unprecedented (and, rather more unbelievably, partially secret) extension of governmental jurisdiction in the areas of ID for travel, using the DHS and TSA as enforcement bodies. One of the people caught up in this legal expansion was John Perry Barlow, another EFF co-founder, who found himself in jail after being arrested at San Francisco Airport in 2004. This case is still wending its way through the court system, but it is entirely possible that Barlow will have no recourse, since almost every appellate court currently seems to be meekly acquiescing to all governmental demands for accomodation in extending the reach and meaning of secrecy and ID laws.