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(my PGP key, and you can get PGP from here)
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I feel like a gerbil in an exercise wheel. I would like to do something else for a bit, but what? Join the Foreign Legion? Breed rabbits? Open a pub? ... Perhaps the academic life might suit me [but] In four years time I would emerge thin and pasty, blinking like a mole. I can see myself on my release day as I stand on the pavement, shabby and pathetic. I am hunched against the biting wind, and all my possessions are next to me in a battered suitcase. Laughed at by women and splashed by the passing trucks ...Aye. On the plus side, at least I don't have a degree in social sciences.
Adopt a manatee for $25 and you'll receive a photo of your manatee, the manatee's biography, an adoption certificate, and a membership handbook with more information on manatees.Bargain!
Visiting the magnificent new library at Alexandria last week, I noticed that Saddam Hussein contributed a cheque of $21m to the building, around 10 per cent of the total cost. Can President Bush boast of a comparable legacy to the advancement of civilisation, learning and culture?Hmmm, that's a tricky one. Let's see. Killing and scattering the Taliban, thereby allowing Afghan girls to go to school, sounds like a good concrete step down the road to civilisation, learning and culture.
He returned them all, but some copies of an 1999 intelligence report on terrorist plots to disrupt millennium celebrations are still missing. Mr Berger believes he may have inadvertently discarded them.First sentence conflicts with second sentence: is not possible that he returned them all and discarded some of them. Also, we cannot know what Mr Berger believes, we can only know what he says. Suggest rephrase as...
He claimed to have returned them all, but some copies of a 1999 intelligence report on terrorist plots to disrupt millennium celebrations are still missing. Mr Berger says he may have inadvertently discarded them.
One of America's largest nuclear weapons research laboratories has suspended its activities after secret information went missing.Have they checked down the back of the sofa? That's where stuff always ends up when it goes missing.
It's a shame all those investing so much time in "debunking" Fahrenheit 9/11 (Letters, July 14) didn't do the same for Black Hawk Down, Die Hard, Top Gun etc.I think someone ought to break this to Matthew gently... Black Hawk Down, Die Hard and Top Gun did not claim to be documentaries.
So glad that our Tony has now slithered himself a plucky and important millimetre away from Bush - "I now feel I can only agree absolutely with 99% of what the lovely president thinks and does". Sturdy chap, our premier. But if he's looking to improve his personal popularity - we can hardly expect him to be acting out of conscience - he still has to deal with the difficulty that if Bush and Blair together are the Laurel and Hardy of demonic foreign policy, Bush and Blair apart are quite evil enough to provoke spontaneous vomiting in small children.Only 3 sentences in and we already have Tony Blair slithering, words being put in his mouth, "demonic" foreign policies and describing people as "evil enough to provoke spontaneous vomiting in small children". Way to build a solid platform of rational argument, Alison.
Now, like many British citizens, I'd rather not think about our ghastly leader, but Bush is rather harder to blot out. It's that whole terror thing. I've been waking up screaming since I was five, so I find I am slightly susceptible to terror. Not the $60bn-earmarked-for-next-year, civil-rights-dissolving, Orange Alert type of terror - I mean real terror.Aha, you mean the murdering-3000-people-in-one-morning type of terror?
And it's not as if the genuine terror of Bush is hard to notice.No, I thought that wouldn't be the sort of terror you meant.
Within hours of coming into office, he'd started approving oil exploration in national parks, cutting support for disadvantaged children, raising the levels of arsenic in drinking water...The man can change the chemistry of drinking water? Erm, no. What he actually did was oppose a lowering of the permitted level of arsenic in drinking water. He didn't raise the levels of arsenic - he opposed a lowering of the permitted level from where it been for 50 years. I'm not aware of waterborne arsenic poisoning having been a major public health issue in the States during that time.
Being an utter bastard with numbing consistency is his only speciality beyond mangling his native language and playing golf like an unhinged Muppet in times of crisis.Credit where it's due: I think "like an unhinged Muppet" is an excellent turn of phrase. Flailing at her keyboard like an unhinged muppet, she continues:
But Team Bush could never be happy just tormenting its own (non-millionaire) citizens - the misery must spread. So we in the rest of the world get to be alarmed by the whole sabotaging Kyoto thing, the murdering strangers for fun and profit thing and the screwing the Middle East in hopes of Armageddon thing. But what gets slightly less attention is the reviving the cold war arms race thing.*sigh*
It seemed momentarily puzzling when the US withdrew from the anti-ballistic missile treaty and started developing cuter, smaller types of "battlefield" nukes when there didn't seem to be a cold war any more. These things were of little or no help against mobile terror cells and the Pentagon had proved itself completely unable to protect even its own troops from the radiation produced by existing DU weapons.Not this "radioactive DU weapons" nonsense again. Depleted uranium is feebly radioactive. It is less radioactive than natural uranium (hence the name "depleted"). It really is the least radioactive thing in the entire universe which still technically deserves to be called "radioactive". It is chemically toxic, like mercury is, but so are other metals which are used as weapons, like lead. While American plans to develop newer smaller nuclear weapons cause loud unhappiness, French plans to develop similar weapons are not considered worth mentioning.
But, of course, all this lucrative US nuclear development was bound to alarm the Russians and therefore justify itself retrospectively. Hence, Mr Putin's obliging announcement that his scientists have developed a vigorous response to America's ballistic missile defence. The fact that BMD won't work as advertised is, of course, balanced by the fact that it gets nukes very close to Russia and is supposed to be pre-emptive not defensive. Don't worry if this doesn't make sense - it makes money, which is much more important.Ballistic Missile Defence "gets nukes closer to Russia"? And if it won't work as advertised then surely there's no reason for anyone to get alarmed about it. Don't worry if this article doesn't make sense - it gets the writer paid and fills the Guardian 'Comment' page, which is much more important.
And the new cold war is why US military nuclear facilities (which have been closed down as unsafe by the FBI in the past) are now immune from environmental legislation. Better yet, plans for the Nevada test site now include sexy, actual testing of nuclear weapons. Needless to say this is really pleasing everyone in Las Vegas, which is only 65 miles away, and everyone in Utah - soon to be renamed Downwind, the Malignantly Mutating State. Naturally, attempts to amend the relevant Defence Authorisation Act failed.Over the years the Nevada test site has seen something like one thousand nuclear tests, yet Utah remains stubbornly habitable. It seems unlikely that a dozen or so tests (which I personally oppose) of relatively small bombs will suddenly irradiate Las Vegas.
But the Bushies' joy doesn't end there, because the Nevada test site isn't even on United States land - it's on territory which belongs to the Western Shoshone nation and is protected by treaty (should you feel that treaties between the US and indigenous peoples are in any way binding). The Yucca Mountain site earmarked for America's nuclear waste depository is also on Western Shoshone land, as is the planned Federal Counterterrorism Facility. And what is probably the world's third largest gold-producing area.Yucca Mountain has been the planned site for long term nuclear waste storage since 1987. Anybody who can think of a better place for nuclear waste than deep underground a mountain in a desert is very welcome to come forward with ideas.
Which is why Karl Rove and George W have both visited Nevada lately and why seizures of Shoshone livestock have already started. Despite formal opposition from 80% of the Shoshone population, Amnesty International and the National Congress of American Indians, Congress has just passed the Western Shoshone distribution bill - which distributes 15 cents on the acre for huge tracts of land in four states, whether the owners intended to sell or not.I'm assuming she means this law, the joint brainchild of a Republican and a Democrat congressman (ie: not a creation of the evil neo-con "Bushies"), which "[distributes] approximately $145 million in principle and interest to over 6,000 eligible [Western Shoshone] tribal members" in compensation for "gradual encroachment" on their land. Even for a huge tract of land $145 million makes a whole lot more than 15 cents per acre.
So with one bill, the neo-cons can ensure cancer misery on an epidemic scale, mindlessly polluting mineral extraction, increased efficiency in the belligerent surveillance of an entire population, world war three and one in the eye for them pesky redskins.A bill compensating people for losses does all that? Woman, you're making no sense at all.
Recent Irish revelations suggest that George is in his jimjams by 5pm and now we know why. His days are full of such knee-trembling thrills that it's a miracle he ever gets up off his back.What is she going on about? Irish revelations? Knee-trembling thrills? As mad as a box of kittens, this Kennedy woman. [Update, 16 July: new jimjam info has come to my attention.]
Talking of miracles, Bush was recently quizzed about his special relationship with Jesus and carefully assured his questioner that it "doesn't make me a better person than you". His delivery didn't convince. When he can do whatever he wants, whatever the consequences, surely that makes him better than all of us....and Jesus wept.
The NTS is a bountiful wildlife preserve inhabited by a variety of animals ranging from kangaroo rats to mule deer ... and any employee who purposely harms an animal there faces dismissal.Except with a nuclear weapon, obviously. Hey - you can't make an omlette without breaking eggs. Or vapourising some kangaroo rats. Or something.
Good afternoon, Jon Snow here with dispatches from the Channel 4 Newsroom front line.Oh dear. A few things wrong with that. Leave aside whether it's appropriate for an "impartial newsreader" to be editorialising about the structure of Parliament, and ad-hominen about what people may or may not have been getting up to in their private lives.
Smacking debate reaches the Lords
==========================
Gazooks, what have we come to? Seven hundred and fifty unelected, unaccountable Lords and Ladyships discussing smacking children. A strange place to be debating so critical an issue to the family. What's wrong with the place to which we elected our accountable MPs?
For some arcane reason the Government prefers to have these freeloaders in the other place talk about this stuff. In the good old days of the hegemony of the bloodline, when inheritance dictated the content of this anachronistic body, you'd have peers who were getting a regular smacking in between debates. Was it Lord Lampton...? Lord Jellicoe...? One loses the sense of who brought which particular expertise to the House of Lords in these matters.
Much more seriously, it was Lord Herbert Laming who raised the issue of smacking children in his report into the murder of Victoria Climbie. He tells us tonight that there is no need to change the legislation anyway. The Government seems to have moved from a position of wanting change to a position of hiding behind a Lib Dem motion which will simply re-phrase the current law. It all seesm to fit in with the farce that the Upper House has become, if indeed so undemocratic a body was ever anything else.
Do this. Don't do that. Stay back in line. Where's tax receipt? Fill out form. Let's see license. Submit six copies. Exit only. No left turn. No right turn. Queue up and pay fine. Take back and get stamped. Drop dead - but first get permit.
The words "you loosers" were scrawled in red pen across the five-foot high picture of the England captain at the Royal Academy of Arts' Fifa 100 show.Or just maybe because the person who would go and deface a picture in a gallery is also the sort of person who can't spell "loser".
... The misspelling of 'losers' may have been a reference to Rebecca Loos, whose claims of an affair with Beckham made headlines earlier this year. ...
The BMI can be calculated only by dividing your weight in kilograms by the square of your height in metres. The target range is 20 - 25. Anyone with a BMI of 30 is obese. Such calculations cannot be done by using stones, pounds, feet, inches etc.Wrong, wrong, wrong. NASA sent men to the moon over 30 years ago using stones, pounds, feet and inches so using them to work out whether someone's scrawny or a porker is a doddle. What we engineers technically refer to as "dimensional analysis*" shows that BMI is simply a measure of mass per unit area, so can be calculated by dividing your weight (strictly your mass, but let's not go down that nit-picky route) in any unit by the square of your height in any unit. It could be calculated by dividing a person's weight in hundredweight by the square of their height in millimetres, if we felt so inclined. If dividing weight in kilograms by the square of height in metres the healthy range is 20-25 kg/m2. If dividing the weight in pounds by the square of the height in feet the target range is 4-5 lb/ft2. Anyone with a BMI of over 6 pounds per square foot would be considered obese.
Thus, unless the relevant authorities are prepared to educate the public to understand and use metric units, the probable result will be that children (who of course learn metric at school) will take home this important information, but many parents will not understand and act upon it because it is in newfangled metric.Because if the message "this child is overweight" is in newfangled metric it will not be understood? Doubtful. Of course if that's true then surely it makes sense to give the information to the parents in a form they understand - using the olde worlde units with which they feel confident if that's really what it takes.
Completing metric conversion (and discontinuing the use of obsolete imperial units) is therefore an urgent public health issue.This is what we engineers technically refer to as "unmitigated bollocks".
Sarah Smith here with your daily dose of news from the Channel Four newsroom. ...(My emphasis) Contrast with this report from AP:
TERMINATOR
==========
And we'll be bringing you the shocking news that Arnie the "Terminator" - aka the Governor of California - is going to allow all stray animals in the state to be put to death immediately they re captured. All to save a few dollars. Surely no elected politician would dare try that here?
Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to repeal a state law that requires animal shelters to hold stray dogs and cats for up to six days before killing them.(My emphasis) I like cats, and I like some dogs, and I'll grant you that rabbits have cute twitchy noses. But Arnie was elected mainly because of California's massive public budget defecit, so he has a duty to reduce non-essential expenditure (surely no elected politician would dare try that here?). To save $14 million (per year?) - more than "a few dollars" - he wants to repeal a 6 year old law. I can't imagine California was a notorious killing ground for stray pets before the 1998 law was introduced, so it's hardly a huge leap back into a terrible distant past. Cats and dogs won't be able to be put to death immediately: there will be an enforced three day wait.
Instead, there would be a three-day requirement for strays. Other animals, including birds, hamsters, potbellied pigs, rabbits, snakes and turtles, could be killed immediately.
Schwarzenegger has told the state Legislature that the changes could save local governments that operate shelters up to $14 million.
...
The 1998 law is named for former state Sen. Tom Hayden, who said the governor's proposal "will inflict heartbreak on a lot of owners and people in the animal adoption world."
... Castro wore his olive-green military uniform as he spoke before a 12-meter (40-foot) likeness of Bush, also in a military uniform and daubed with a Hitler-style mustache.
Below the photo, hung near the US Interests Section in Havana, was the text: "Bush, Fascist: There Is No Aggression Cuba Cannot Resist." ...
To promote the welfare of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine of North America, in general and particularly in the State of Florida.Keeps them off the streets and out of trouble, I suppose.
Our invasion of Iraq has led to the slaughter and mutilation of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis. ...... without giving any source for those numbers. It has also led to the end of the government and sanctions which were killing and mistreating (or "slaughtering and mutilating", if we prefer) tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis every year.
We assume that the horrors of Saddam Hussein were perpetrated against those whom he saw as political enemies, whereas we have killed, blinded, maimed and disabled those who just wanted to live their lives in peace.See? Saddam Hussein only killed, tortured and maimed those he saw as political enemies. So that's okay then. I suppose quite a lot of his political enemies may have just wanted to live their lives in peace, but... nah. He concludes:
The Britain I see around me every day howls with the pain of drugs, alcoholism, violence, ageism, rape, media degradation, xenophobia, sex obsession, the misery of the young and of couples, and the enshrinement of money as the ultimate criterion of value.That's so eerily accurate. I am in fact writing this while crouched behind a wall trying to avoid the mobs of alcoholic sex obsessed violent young rapists who have been whipped into a drug-fuelled xenophobic frenzy by a combination of their innner misery and the degenerate media. And I'm howling with pain. Howling, I say.
Back in January, the prestigious Carnegie Endowment said: "The most intensive searching over the last two years has produced no solid evidence of a co-operative relationship between Saddam Hussein's government and al-Qaeda."...Vladimir Putin says Russia warned the US of Iraq planning attacks against America:
Russian President Vladimir Putin says that after the 9/11 attacks Moscow warned Washington that Saddam Hussein was planning attacks on the US.I expect the "massive Russian intelligence blunder" will be given lots of airtime on major news programs and will figure prominently on newspaper front pages. I can almost see the protest banners already: "Putin lied, people died!". No, really.
He said Russia's secret service had information on more than one occasion that Iraq was preparing acts of terror in the US and its facilities worldwide. ...
Speaking on a visit to Kazakhstan, Mr Putin said Russia had warned the US on several occasions that Iraq was planning "terrorist attacks" on its soil.
"After the events of 11 September 2001, and before the start of the military operation in Iraq, Russian special services several times received such information and passed it on to their American colleagues," he told reporters. ...
the threat [of Iraqi biological and chemical weapons] related to what could be developed in future rather than what Iraq actually had. .. "Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programmes"But the same Carnegie Endowment was all over the press in December 2002 saying that it would be wrong to invade Iraq because they might use their chemical or biological weapons, thereby sparking a massive escalation:
... there are several very plausible scenarios that could turn the war into a catastrophe. These include the use of chemical or biological weapons against US troops; an attack on Israel that prompts an Israeli counter-attack, possibly with a nuclear weapon ...They didn't say whether those Iraqi chemical or biological weapons were the ones from which US government officials had "systematically misrepresented the threat", or the ones about which the Carnegie Endowment itself reported in August 2002:
Iraq almost certainly does not have nuclear weapons; but it almost certainly does have large numbers of chemical weapons and some biological weapons or agents. ...As punditry goes that's quite, erm, prestigious.
These capabilities are, and have been for over twenty years, a threat to Iraq's neighbors and to its own people. ...
Because of the size of the Iraqi program, however, it is widely believed that significant quantities of chemical agents and precursors remain stored in secret depots. U.N. officials have publicly expressed their doubts that the entire Iraqi stockpile of chemical weapons was found. Rough estimates conclude that Iraq may have retained up to 600 metric tons of agents, including VX, mustard gas and sarin. There are thousands of possible chemical munitions still unaccounted for. ...
A man who was bundled into a car [in Luton] by robbers, escaped by biting one of his captors on the nose. ...If you see a man in Luton with a damaged nose, do not approach him as he may be armed and irritable: report him at once to the police. Then get the hell out of Luton.
Bedfordshire Police said when the man was assaulted again [in Luton] he bit one of the robbers and jumped from the car. ...
Police said one [of the attackers] was likely to have an injury to his nose.
Imagine an ordinary baseball...Now imagine that same baseball with over 18,135 coats of paint on it. Getting the picture? Good, because that's exactly what my wife, Glenda and I have done for the past 27 years.I bet his mother in law feels so proud Glenda found a man like that.
Oh, no. The football has started: three weeks of sub-human chanting and babyish celebrations ... People who like football should be rounded up, put in boxes and bulldozed into the sea. That's the only long term solution.
ARMED police yesterday stormed a former cold war nuclear bunker in Fife, bringing an end to a siege that had lasted almost 60 hours. ... No-one was hurt during the raid and it is not thought any shots were fired. ...Armed police storm bunker, man gives up and walks out peacefully. Isn't that always the way?
I'm going out on a limb here, but I can see Ken in a couple of month's time walking into an American consulate and getting another passport when he finds out that being a US citizen and able to prove it is quite amazingly convenient. If nothing else, he'll find it hard to get to the Gaza Strip and party it up with Hamas or chase after the press pack travelling on a Citizen of the World passport.Well guess what's happened? He must have got himself a new passport, because he's gone to Israel. And he's been arrested trying to get into the Gaza Strip to "strengthen his contact with Palestinian militant groups Islamic Jihad and Hamas", and he's gone on hunger strike to protest against this constraint on his freedom. Going on hunger strike and saying that he'd been trying to strengthen his contact with Islamic Jihad and Hamas strikes me as a really bad move. Just imagine the gist of his interview with the jailer:
"Let me out, or I will starve myself to death!"
"And if I let you out... what will you do then?"
"I will make revolutionary plans with the fighters of Islamic Jihad and Hamas!"
"Hmmm. And I am supposed to think it would be a bad thing if you starve yourself to death?"
"Oh. I see your point. Bugger."
... If I don't vote Labour, I probably won't vote at all which will be very difficult for me. It will be very emotional. I have joined Respect because I feel at ease with them, but I don't think I will be voting for them.*sigh*. Respect - the party that even its celebrity membership doesn't much feel like voting for.
-- Mark Steel, comedian and writer
A work of art made by Tracey Emin for model Kate Moss has been found dumped in a skip in east London. The piece - consisting of neon tubing spelling the words Moss Kin - had been mistakenly thrown out of a basement, the model's spokeswoman said. ...Thrown out by mistake, you say? A likely story.
Mr MacDonald's plans are unclear, but police said they hoped the situation could be resolved soon.No kidding?
... When the Charge Envelope or Capacitance is Fractal, The Chalice for Info Pours Directly Between Hearts and Trees ( Which after all is a Name for a Fractal... tree.. branching algorhythmn, phi lo taxis.. maximum exposure/minimum superposition..) ...Erm. Riiiiiiiight...
The Saudi people are fed up seeing all the money that is earned from the production of the oil go to the Royal Family and the US. ...Yes, it's the Saudi royal family in cahoots with those greedy American oil companies. Oh, wait, what's this?
Sunday, 16 November, 2003Ah. So the production of Saudi oil is entirely in Saudi hands with the exception of a small, recent Anglo-Dutch and French involvement. I'm not sure how so much of the money that's earned manages to go to the US then. Surely the opposite is true, with the US paying Saudi Arabia.
Royal Dutch/Shell and Total have signed a long-awaited $2bn deal to develop Saudi Arabia's huge gas reserves.
The two are the first western firms to win energy rights in Saudi Arabia since the industry was nationalised in 1975. ...
The men on Arab streets are filled with hatred and anger on the American policies in Iraq. Had it not been for the strict Saudi Government; no American would have been alive here. ...That's nice.
Every foreigner involved with drilling, collection and distribution of oil in the Middle East needs to leave. Now. It's not like they have any right to be there.Yeah. It's not as if they're legally employed doing anything useful like providing a whole load of skilled labour needed to drill, collect and distribute the oil on which the region's economy largely depends.
The Oasis compound is an ultra-luxurious Western compound, no doubt fuelling feelings of resentment in those who oppose Western presence in the Kingdom ...I can understand how foreigners living it up in luxury might create a certain friction, but surely not quite enough to cause anyone to storm their residence and go on a killing frenzy. Wealthy foreigners live in luxury next to relatively poor locals in many parts of the world (tourist resorts in Latin America and the Carribean spring to mind) without anyone killing anybody else.
The USA sows hatred across every continent and now they are reaping their rewards. Sadly only civilians suffer.The USA are "reaping their rewards" for sowing hatred. That certainly explains the death toll of 8 Indians, 3 Filipinos, 3 Saudis, 2 Sri Lankans, 1 Egyptian, 1 Swede, 1 South African, 1 Italian, 1 Briton and 1 American doesn't it, Vajid? It looks like, if Afreen Baig's angry friends had their way, there would be no Indians or Filipinos left alive in the country.
At The Oasis, Life in Saudi Arabia is not what it used to be!That's not much of a selling point any more.
