"Over the last few years, as the conservative movement in the U.S. has become more entrenched, many people I know are looking for better lives in Canada, Europe, and Australia," a noted entymologist at the University of Illinois emailed me recently. "From bloggers and programmers to members of the National Academy I have spoken with, all find the Zeitgeist alien and even threatening. My friend says it is like trying to research and do business in the 21st century in a culture that wants to live in the 19th, empires, bibles and all.

   

   

Burger King customers visiting a drive-through restaurant had to run a gamut of abuse after pranksters succeeded in hacking into the outlet's wireless intercom system...one customer was told "You don't need a couple of Whoppers. You are too fat. Pull ahead."

"I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, has come in and taken their place."

   

"We owe Arabs nothing", Kilroy-Silk scorned the Arab world. It had contributed almost nothing to civilisation, he said, and he referred to Arabs as "suicide bombers, limb-amputators, women repressors".

If Kilroy's condemnations of "parasitical" asylum-seekers, "the foreign-born Peter Hain" and the "peasants, priests and pixies" of Ireland sound a touch xenophobic, he has also displayed a readiness to support common men of whatever colour. He recently took up the case of a motorist who was intimidated by the police in Cheltenham. "Why? Because he was black." The effect was spoiled slightly when we learnt the harassed black was his chauffeur, who could presumably take him to Heathrow in the Blair manner.

"To accidentally make one inflamatory racist comment may be regarded as a misfortune. To make a second looks like carelessness."

   

It's the "Stupid factor," the S factor: Some people -- sometimes through no fault of their own -- are just not very bright.

It's not merely that some people are insufficiently intelligent to grasp the nuances of foreign policy, of constitutional law, of macroeconomics or of the variegated interplay of humans and the environment. These aren't the people I'm referring to. The people I'm referring to cannot understand the phenomenon of cause and effect. They're perplexed by issues comprising more than two sides. They don't have the wherewithal to expand the sources of their information. And above all -- far above all -- they don't think.

   

The international space station is experiencing a slow, steady drop in air pressure, and American and Russian flight controllers are investigating possible causes of the leak.

Mission Control notified astronaut Michael Foale and cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri about the leak just before their bedtime late Monday afternoon.