Irving Progressive

Here is a sample of the proposals in the letter:

For each member of Congress, I propose we set up a collective internet site. This site will allow interested members of the public to, in realtime, monitor your every activity to assure ourselves that none of you are committing illegal or terrorist-enabling acts at any given moment of the day.

The primary feature will be the ability to listen in to any conversation you may be having, whether it be on your work phone, your home phone, your cell phone, text messages, email -- whatever. These conversations will be streamed to the internet, so that they may be monitored by responsible members of the public. The contact information of whoever it is you are talking to at that moment at time will also be displayed and tracked -- whether it be your wife or husband, child, doctor, secret mistress, whoever -- so that we can monitor them as well. You know, just to be safe.

You can trust us, as members of the public, to be discreet. We will only listen and watch, and will not abuse the information. After all, what could any of you possibly have to hide? Only someone intent on criminal acts objects to being monitored proactively. On the contrary, you should be grateful to us: by listening to your every phone call and reading your every communication, we can only help you to prove that you have nothing to hide. I am unfamiliar with the vagaries of American law these days, but my understanding is that this ongoing surveillance will make you even more innocent than you were before. Perhaps you will even be twice as innocent as before, or four times as innocent -- what patriot could resist?

There is also a final sting in the tail:

There is another matter that needs addressing, which is that it may be necessary at some point to torture one or two of you, just to make very, very certain that you do not know something about terrorists that you perhaps might be hiding. No need to worry about that now; we can address that in separate legislation.

I laughed so much when I read this, that I was originally going to categorize it here under Comedy. Then I realized that we are in an era where (as The Onion has proved) it is becoming very difficult to distinguish fact from fiction in the governance of modern America.
Sadly, this is another one of the "sad, unbelieveable but stupid" governance events. I hope that the letter was sent to Messrs. Hoyer and Rockefeller...

UPDATE - Some of the comments are priceless. Examples:

I've already got a name picked out:

Governmental Oversight Delegation

And then we can send them text messages from time to time, just as a courtesy reminder, that says:

G.O.D. is watching you.

I have here in my hands a list of 535 - a list of names that were made known to the general public as being members of the United States Congress and who nevertheless are still working and subverting the Constitution of the American government.

Have they no shame? We shall see.

Some constructive criticism here...
This is quite good, Hunter, but I think that maybe you should go back to writing satire.

The ex-BBC sports commentator David Coleman found his name (not 100% fairly) appropriated in the 1970's to describe an example of nonsense speech by commentators. They were dubbed "Colemanballs". Example follows:

For those of you with the black-and-white sets, Liverpool are the team in the all-red strip

This site lists a whole bunch of other examples of malapropism, garbled, and in some cases nonsensical speech from the world of British soccer.
Here is another collection of similar stuff.
There will be overlaps.

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.

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.

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.

...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...

...are available here.

...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.

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.

...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).

Read this story and then determine if there is any way that it is not highly amusing...

...of the USS Iowa moored in the sunset, covered with Christmas lights at NAS Norfolk, VA, in December 1984.

As a victim of bullying in high school, partly because I laboured under the clearly-naive delusion that school was a place where you went to acquire an education and learn stuff, the deja vu flooded over me when I read this article in the NYT about a high schooler being bullied in Fayetville AR. One of the more sinister developments is this one (which could not have happened in my high school period):

In ninth grade, a couple of the same boys started a Facebook page called “Every One That Hates Billy Wolfe.” It featured a photograph of Billy’s face superimposed over a likeness of Peter Pan, and provided this description of its purpose: “There is no reason anyone should like billy he’s a little bitch. And a homosexual that NO ONE LIKES.”

Delightful stuff.
Billy's parents are currently suing the school district, among others, over the treatment that their son has received. As is depressingly normal in these situations, the real scandal is not the bullying itself (there are always dysfunctional jerks in school, as in life), but the meek, incurious inaction by the school management, who seem (as ever) to live in a quaint world where bullying is a rite of passage, to be passively tolerated. This is professional negligence, and the school management and their leaders deserve to have their asses legally and fiscally kicked up the air. The only thing that is likely to cause a modification of behaviour is s righteous public slamming.

My sister is a co-owner of a restaurant in Polperro, Cornwall - The Pol Mary Restaurant. This is primarily a tourist restaurant. Needless to say, they get all types of customers, from the extremely nice and polite to the rude, demanding and obnoxious. However, this Yahoo exchange from yesterday with Cath revealed a new type of customer. For reference, "Peter" is one of the co-owners of the restaurant.
I was dying laughing reading this:

Cath: we had a dog eat part of a table last night
Cath: I guess he got bored
Cath: so next time you get a bit bored in a restaurant, eat a bit of the table
Cath: it’s obviously the done thing in the right circles
Graham: did you bill the customer for the bit of the table?
Cath: nope, we didn't notice until after he'd left the premises!
Cath: and found the heap of a zillion teak coloured bits
Cath: and realised the dowel had gone from the side of the table
Graham: name and shame!
Cath: didn't ask him name, but he was a nice black lab
Cath: Splodge was on table 1, but it wasn't him
Cath: or the little dogs on table 6
Cath: it was that black lab who had camped out under that table, table 7
Graham: hmm
Cath: you'd have thought his owners might have heard him munching the table
Cath: we gave him bikkits, he shouldn't have been hungry
Cath: maybe they thunk he'd brung a stick in with him
Cath: but the fact it was teak coloured might have been a pointer
Graham: this is bizarre...but also bizarrely funny
Cath: I guess he was fed up with waiting all night
Cath: so made his own arrangements re: inhouse entertainment
Cath: I guess he found the dowel on the floor and one thing led to another, and before he knew it, he'd munched it into a zillion bits
Cath: even duct tape no good for this
Cath: or furniture glue
Cath: Peter most disturbed
Cath: he got to make another one
Cath: before the table falls down
Cath: so we must only seat light people there
Cath: until it is reinforced
Cath: so we told Peter not to sit people there for lunch
Cath: just in case
Graham: what did they think that munching noise was then?
Cath: exactly
Cath: I can't believe they didn't hear it
Cath: we thought he must have eaten a stick, until we spotted it was once teak-coloured
Cath: and then noticed the piece of table missing
Cath: Peter looked at the bits and cried “That's a piece of my bloody table! The bastard has eaten my table!”
Cath: whoops
Cath: the first time we have had any dog damage
Cath: had people and kid damage before, but not doggy damage
Cath: normally it is busted glasses, forks gouged into table tops etc or stolen gear, not eaten tables
Cath: nobody ever ate a piece of table before
Cath: that's a new one
Cath: maybe he got worms
Cath: probably got woodworm now
Cath: tonight another black Lab wandered into the kitchen
Cath: and Peter screamed “Get out or we'll cook you!”

It gets better...this is a further story:

Cath: there was also the case of the picnic table being thrown across the terrace ....
Cath: by the irate punter who wanted just beer, and wouldn't take No for an answer.
Cath: We tried explaining that we weren't allowed to sell alcohol without a substantial meal
Cath: but he didn't believe us
Cath: and got irate about it, being the worse for wear to begin with
Cath: so he picked up one of the big tables on the terrace and hurled it at us
Cath: in disgust
Cath: alcohol was the last thing he actually needed, if you get my drift
Graham: did it hit anybody
Cath: so as well as dogs eating tables, we get humans hurling them.
Cath: we get people coming up with their dogs to claim their biscuits, because the sign says Dogs are Welcome, ask for a biscuit. They obviously don't feel obliged to frequent our humble abode, they just want the free bikkits.
Cath: One cheeky swine even asked if his dog could have a meal, as well as a biscuit?! He could have had a dinner, if his owner was having something to eat, but he wasn't!
Cath: We often do doggie dinners, but only if the human beings are eating with us.
Graham: It seems like there are some rather unscrupulous dog owners
Cath: There are limits.
Cath: We used to have two highchairs until a fat bastard sat on the tray on one of them and smashed it.
Cath: He just propped it back up and left, without owning up.
Cath: Then there was the man who flushed his underpants down the gent's loo and blocked the main sewer outside and bunged up the whole of the Coombes.
Cath: Peter enjoyed that one (not) as he had to unbung everything and dig out the underpants.
Cath: and the person who stole the Portmeirion vase from the ladies restroom.
Cath: having first tipped out all the lavender seeds wot were in it at the time.
Cath: funny how you remember all the arseholes.
Cath: but we do get some lovely people too!

..has been written by commentators who have been asked to retrospectively assess their (mostly) gung-ho support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Anybody hoping for mea culpas of the "we were wrong and here's why" variety will be largely disappointed. As Glenn Greenwald explains here, many of the commentators chose to deploy variants of the "right idea, lousy execution" explanation, which rather neatly sidesteps any discussion of whether the idea of invading Iraq was a Really Bad Idea to begin with. The only commentator who appears to have any conception of what should happen now is Timothy Noah, who had this to say:

A larger question, though: Why should you waste your time, at this late date, ingesting the opinions of people who were wrong about Iraq? Wouldn't you benefit more from considering the views of people who were right? Five years after this terrible war began, it remains true that respectable mainstream discussion about its lessons is nearly exclusively confined to people who supported the war, even though that same mainstream acknowledges, for the most part, that the war was a mistake. That's true of Slate's symposium, and it was true of a similar symposium that appeared March 16 on the New York Times' op-ed pages. The people who opposed U.S. entry into the Iraq war, it would appear, are insufficiently "serious" to explain why they were right.

However, I found the most compelling piece of verbiage in this section to be this well-constructed home truth by commenter Arlington in the discussion forums at Slate:

Your column points out an American tendency with which we need to come to grips. We love war. We say we go to war reluctantly. We say we grieve the sacrifice of the dead and wounded, both ours and theirs. We say all sorts of things to make ourselves look like peace-loving people who only use military force as a last resort.
It's all a pack of lies. Since nobody else is fooled, we're only lying to ourselves.
We maintain a huge war machine, far more powerful than we need to defend ourselves against attack. Not that anyone would attack us in the first place, since they know we'd nuke them into oblivion. If not to defend ourselves, our military is for something else. It's about time we admitted the real reason we keep so many people under arms and provide them with so many powerful and expensive weapons.
The Iraq war finally exposes the truth. We use military power as a substitute for economic and diplomatic power. As the dollar slips in comparison to the Euro, and our diplomatic stature shrinks by the minute, we have no choice but to employ guns and bombs to get our way. Our political leadership is a collection of people who think they're being futuristic and forward-looking by updating the domino theory and dressing it up with visions of a new empire.
Perhaps that will be the legacy of the Bush administration, to prove, once and for all, that not every problem is solved by killing people. Maybe we can regain some of the humanistic optimisim we had when we conceived of ideas like the Marshall Plan and the Peace Corps. Maybe we can do better things in the world than invading and occupying small, depressed nations and "saving" them by killing large numbers of their citizens.
If we can't stop loving war, let's at least learn to keep it in its place. If we have to make war on little countries, let's at least get them back on their feet after we've had our fun with them. Let's not let every dollar be diverted from civic infrastructure, science, and social programs to buy bombs.

That comment neatly summarizes many of my opinions about the underlying pathology that led the USA to blithely occupy a manufactured foreign country and expect a positive medium-term outcome. As Frank Zappa once observed, the US does not have a national defense - it has a national offense. It is way past time for a debate about how the USA appears to have decided that, to use an old phrase, guns are more important than butter.

When I was growing up in the UK in the 1960's, the country was steadily living beyond its means. Although we rapidly exited the Empire business in the late 1950's and early 60's, we still had long-range defence committments as far East as Singapore, and the country had never really recovered from being beaten and stretched every which way in World War II. The result was that eventually our deficit spending led to a run on the pound, devaluation, and a period of drift that was only stopped by the election of Margaret Thatcher.
Bonddad has another posting that shows the true extent of US indebtedness to the rest of the world right now. The US has also been living beyond its means, and the amount of money owed to the rest of the world is approaching staggering levels. One thing I learned many years ago is that although countries do not go bankrupt in any conventional sense, they can still be reduced to penurious ineffectiveness when nobody wants to buy your debt. Sooner or later people stop lending you money because they don't believe they will ever get it back. The Bear Stearns collapse occurred partly because no other businesses wanted to buy or hold its debt and securities. Right now the Federal Reserve is struggling to stabilize the marketplace for asset-backed securities, because of a lack of confidence in the value of those securities. The really scary issue to contemplate is what happens if other countries lose faith in the USA. If that happens, the Federal Reserve will cease to be effective; the "full faith and credit of the United States" will cease to have any credibility.
The other interesting aspect to the charts in Bonddad's posting is how the expansion of debt has mostly occurred under Republican presidents (Reagan, Bush I and now Bush II). Yet the meme "tax and spend Democrats" still has legs. Wake up folks! It's Red Ink Republicans!
UPDATE - This graph shows the recent trend in the US National Debt. Notable is that most of the recent escalation in debt levels has occurred when the Republicans controlled the White House. Interesting attempts in the comments to blame this all on the Democrats...denial is a powerful thing...
UPDATE 2 - A more detailed analysis of the recent trends in the National Debt, with some other links for more analysis. Here is the Wikipedia overview of the US National Debt landscape.

I keep finding profiles on dating sites where the person includes an IM (Instant Messenger) ID as part of the profile text.
However, when I then attempt to contact them via the IM channel, I get the message that my profile has been rejected.
Note to the people who do this: you need to get your ideas straight about IM encounters. If you include an IM id on your profile, you can expect people to try to contact you via the IM route, since many dating sites have poor-quality email and chat capability. If you want to check out somebody's profile before you consent to an IM encounter, then don't give out your IM ID at all. You can always check out the profile, then send it in an email if you like the person and want to talk to them.
Placing your IM id on the profile and then refusing to chat via the IM route is a sure-fire way to ensure that you will have a negative result from anybody who manages encounters via IM. To re-use an old saying, you only have one chance to make a good first impression, and pissing me off by submitting a Yahoo ID and then refusing to chat creates a really bad first impression...

This blog post by Bonddad explains some of the background to the rapid collapse of Bear Stearns, which in a matter of weeks has lurched from being one of the biggest investment banks in the USA to being sold yesterday at the fire-sale price of $2 a share to JP Morgan, with the Federal Reserve effectively underwriting a large part of Bear Stearns' asset pool to allow JP Morgan to go ahead with the sale.
This intervention by the Federal Reserve demonstrates the current level of danger in the US financial sector. The property price collapse, and the subsequent effect on the mortgage-backed securities market, is causing the dreaded "ripple effect" in financial markets. Anybody who tries to act as a cheerleader in the current state of the marketplace should either be asked what they have been smoking, or asked if they want to buy a bridge in New York...
UPDATE - The "ripple effect" has already happened - the firesale of Bear Stearns has caused downturns in other world markets.

...you too can re-use all of those vacuous leadership and project management slogans...

...has ignited a firestorm inside and outside Oklahoma. The video of her speech was initially posted on YouTube, and rapidly caused a widespread wave of condemnation. Here is the transcript of her speech:

The homosexual agenda [Loud snap] is destroying this nation. OK? It's just a fact. [Volume increases] Not everybody's lifestyle is equal, just like not all religions are equal.
You know, the very fact that I'm talking to you like this here today, puts me in jeopardy. OK? Uh and I'm not anti, I'm not gay-bashing, but according to God's word that is not the right kind of lifestyle, it has deadly consequences for those people involved in it, they have more suicides, uh and they're more discouraged, there's more illness, their uh lifespans are shorter, you know?
It's, it's, it's not a lifestyle that is good for this nation.
'Matter of fact, studies show, that no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted more than, you know, a few decades.
So it's the death knell of this country.
I honestly think it's the biggest threat even, that our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam, which I think is a big threat. OK?
Because what's happening now, they're going after er uh in schools - two year-olds!
You know why they're trying to get early childhood education? They want to get our young children into the government schools so they can indoctrinate them! I taught school for close to twenty years and we're not teaching facts and knowledge anymore folks, we're teaching indoctrination. OK?
And they're going after our young children, as young as two years of age, to try to teach them that the homosexual lifestyle is the acceptable lifestyle.
You know, gays are infiltrating city councils.
Do you know? Eureka Springs [Arkansas], anybody been there, for the [Great] Passion Play? [A "Creation Truth" production] OK, have you heard that the city council of Eureka Springs is now controlled by gays? OK?
There are some others. Uh, Pittsburgh, Pa.; Tacoma, Md.; Kensington, Md.; in Vermont, Oregon, West Palm Beach, Fla. and a lot of other places in Florida.
What's happening? And they are winning elections. One of the things I deal with in our legislature, I tried to introduce a bill last year, that would notify parents, uh schools had to let parents know what clubs their students were involved in.
And the reason I did that bill, primarily, was this, we had the Gay-Straight Alliance coming into our schools.
Kids are getting involved in these groups, their lives are being ruined, their parents don't know about it. So I introduced a bill that said you have to notify all clubs, and things. And one of my colleagues said, "Well, you know we don't have a gay problem in my community, so that's why I voted against that bill."
Well you know what? To me that is so dumb. If you've got cancer or something in your little toe, do you say, Well you know I’m just gonna forget about it, 'cause the rest of you's fine?
It spreads! OK?
And this, this stuff is deadly, and it's spreading and it will destroy uh our young people, it will destroy this nation.

The unfortunate thing about a lot of the reactions to Rep. Kern's speech is that they focusssed on calling her words "hate speech". While the sentiments expressed are confused, uninformed and bigoted, the danger of labelling disagreeable words as "hate speech" is that such a statement raises the emotional temperature of any debate and distracts from the need to comprehensively dismantle the speech to show that it is lacking in any cogency or intelligence. The emotional response from many activists of sending offensive emails to Rep. Kern also does not help since it allows her to play the martyr (and we know from watching organized religion over many hundreds of years that there is very little in life that is more appealing to a hard-core monotheist than the prospect of public martyrdom, as they fight the good fight against "evil" and "decadence").
By any standards, the speech (if you can call it that) is long on fear-driven rhetoric and very short on anything comprising a coherent argument. It reads like a bar-room drunk poking somebody in the chest as he rails against imaginary evils. I could take it apart and reduce it to little pieces, but I do not have the time right now.
Rep. Kern issued a statement recently in response to the expressions of outrage. Rather predictably, the statement essentially focuses on what she says is her right to make statements, hiding by implication behind the 1st Amendment. She also claims that she is correct (surprise surprise). In other words, petulantly unrepentant.
The more interesting aspect of this event is that Rep. Kern apparently obtained a standing ovation from her party's state caucus after reading some of the responses. I have no doubt that she focussed on cherry-picking the more vituperative and threatening responses. However, it is notable that not a single leading elected representative in OKC or the state of Oklahoma has stepped up to dismantle the speech and assert its intellectual bankruptcy. I was therefore moved to send this email to the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce this morning:

By now you must surely be aware of the speech made by State Rep. Sally Kern, where, among other statements, she made the statement that "homosexuality is a bigger threat to our nation than terrorism or Islam". Rep. Kern's response to criticism of her speech ignores the hyperbolic falsehood of that statement in favour of a sniffy defense of her right to free speech, and more hand-waving about "homesexual activists". Both her speech and response are almost totally devoid of any logical argument in favour of her position. In short, her arguments are intellectually risible.
It seems that the Oklahoma State Legislature is currently more interested in investigating alleged death threats against Rep. Kern than it is in pointing out that (a) her remarks have no basis in fact (b) are directly in conflict with two of the goals of the Great Oklahoma City Chamber goals, as published on your web site:

GOALS
> To create a business climate that attracts new businesses and enhances growth and expansion opportunities for existing businesses.
> To create a community with an irresistible quality of life.
> To create value-added membership opportunities and benefits.

"Irresistible quality of life" is not enhanced by a state legislator making inflammatory and bigoted remarks, and by local and state leaders sitting on their hands instead of pointing this out.
Most innovative businesses value creativity and diversity in their workforces. Rep. Kern's remarks certainly do not foster diversity, and most creative people would run a mile from the sort of opinions and thinking explicitly expressed by Rep. Kern.

Right now, the passive acquiescence of the Oklahoma State Legislature is convincing me that Oklahoma City and the state of Oklahoma does not have a proper understanding of the word "inclusive" when it comes to attracting businesses or people to relocate to or spend money in the state.
My personal philosophy is that if a state or community wishes to underwrite ideology in the pursuit of commerce, whether that is active or passive underwriting, I reserve the right to invoke my own personal ideology in buying decisions when considering whether to buy products and services created by that state or community. For example, I made the decision some time ago to not visit the city of Kanab, UT after the local council passed a "Natural Family Resolution" that made it clear that for them, religiously-based ideology was more important than creating an inclusive business and societal climate.
Accordingly, I am informing you that since Oklahoma's leaders appear to be passively accepting these sort of retrograde views, I intend to ensure that none of my future discretionary spending goes to any business located in Oklahoma City or the state of Oklahoma. I may modify that policy if I see evidence that business and political leaders in Oklahoma City or the state of Oklahoma accept that Rep. Kern's remarks are deeply antithetical to the norms of an inclusive, fair society, and therefore need to be disavowed as not representing the opinions of either Oklahoma or its leaders.

My rule is that if cities or organizations engage in bigoted ideology, I will include ideology in buying decisions. I am currently declining to visit Kanab UT after they passed their "Natural Family Resolution" in 2006. Whether my boycott has any impact is doubtful, but that city passed a resolution that suggested that the family model they approved of was one from the Middle Ages, so I decided to avoid the town, which does impact me since canard pusher fly-ins are held there.

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.

...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.

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.”

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.

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 san