email archives Support the site by shopping through these amazon links: amazon.com amazon.co.uk amazon.de		2008, May 13, Tuesday. This sums up Tony Blair: Playing politics with his wife's miscarriage. Woo-woo: Pentagon plans golf course in Baghdad. It appears to be a legit story; at this point nothing would surprise me. Heh: Hydrogen cars? Not for 40 years. Interesting footnote: in ancient cultures, the number 40 signified "a lot" - it was used to denote an indefinite period...the number recurs in multiple cultures (Jesus's 40 days and 40 nights in the desert, Buddha's 40 days under the Bodhi tree, etc). I find it humourous to see the custom alive and well, even in the light of delusional technofix fantasies. A nice analysis of Shell's Shale Shite. Pin your hopes on this technology at your peril. It won't be ready for 40 years! The Etymology of "Pharmacy": c.1386, "a medicine," from O.Fr. farmacie, from M.L. pharmacia, from Gk. pharmakeia "use of drugs or medicines," from pharmakeus "preparer of drugs," from pharmakon "drug, poison, philter, charm, spell, enchantment." Meaning "use or administration of drugs" is attested from c.1400; that of "place where drugs are prepared and dispensed" is first recorded 1833. Pharmacist coined in Eng. 1834. This poor schmuck spends 100 hours a month commuting. Bloody hell: Citigroup to shed $500 Billion in assets. Story is from a few days ago, so nobody seems to be too bothered! CNN: Get ready for more bank failures. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, May 12, Monday. Yay! Idleworm is on the atheist media site blogroll! (On the right side of the page). The US military were within a whisker of cremating dead US soldiers in a facility that also cremates pets. 2004 Repost: Rumsfeld uses autograph machine to sign Killed in action letters. Thank you God: Anne Coulter hangs out with Gay Porn Stud. Link is a little NSFW - but no full nudity or suchlike, just low grade sleaze. The tacky sites I crawl through so you people can get your cheap laughs... I hope the Olympics will have a gold medal for coughing up blood.       Illegal immigrants are being arrested when they try to LEAVE the US! My plan is for a nun to take me across the border into Switzerland. The hills are alive, with the sound of credit card losers... (you try rhyming with "music", smartass. The US has Nelson Mandela on a terror watchlist! This electric car is a sick joke. 30 miles to a charge, only one passenger, top speed an iffy 75mph (doubtful), and all for the bargain price of $35,000! Oh, it's YELLOW. China claims to have sufficient grain reserves. Communist tyrannies never lie, so I have no choice but to take their word. How to feel the world, but don't mention the population problem! More on mobile phones altering brain behaviour. This would explain a LOT. As a non-phone user, indeed, as a person who eats a diet that's very untypical of most westerners, I have to wonder if their lifestyle (food, phones, tv) is slowly driving them bonkers... A simple way to detect pinhole cameras. Disgusting - the amount of food that people throw away. Great! Melting glaciers release DDT! Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, May 8, Thursday. What happens when you take a Polish TV Soap Opera, and have Irish actors re-dub it? The end result is Soupy Norman! A BBC show from 2031 looks back on the early 21st century: Time Trumpet.       Some weeks ago I tried to talk a friend of a friend out of buying a house in Portland. The guy's a firefighter, and his fiancee wants The House Thing. Poor guy went ahead and bought a place for a ridiculous amount of money. Oh well. "...but you can never tell any body anything I've learned that..." Now China is outsourcing to America. Don't forget to take off your shoes in the airport citizen, so that the convicts can smell your feet. UK wastes 10 billion pounds sterling of food a year. UK to build a 50M tall white horse for £2,000,000! That's right - waste and burn the energy, while we still can! Monbiot: Can we fly on Zeppelins? I've long been an admirer of lighter than air travel - it's the most energy efficient mode of air travel - if not the fastest. Before it can return, the big dumb jet industry will have to collapse. Speed the day. Make a Master Information Document for worst case scenarios. The Washington Post is attacked for posting the photo of a dying Iraqi child being lifted from rubble following a US airstrike. SO publishing the photo is wrong, as opposed the act of child-murder. These people are monsters... Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, May 7, Wednesday. Via Ran Prieur, the ironic observation that Hilary Clinton's horse comes in second, and is euthanised. You see, God is a Cosmic Joker after all. OK, it's a bit too long and overwrought, but The Empire Strikes Barack did make me laugh a few times. A nicely written piece by John Feeney in the Guardian on The Population Timebomb. Reading the comments that follow might give you some idea as to why I've given up hope for salvaging this stupid species. Which leads nicely to: Surplus food supplies dry up. Wheat crop failures could be total. Jeremy Leggett: Dawn of an Energy Famine. Kunstler: We're in a strange collective psychic bubble. Yeah, let's keep breeding. 9 billion people? 90 billion people? It'll all work out. After all, humans are intelligent and resourceful, right? RIGHT? Florida teacher accused of "Wizardry" after performing a magic trick with a toothpick. UK: Billions of dollars wasted on Big Brother spy cameras. Anti-psychotic drug use soars among US and UK children. I know what to do - let's build more roads! US: 120 war vets commit suicide weekly. According to "Christians", they go to hell. RedStateSon: Burma: this season's atrocity. But what if these enlightened celebs were asked to promote human rights in, say, the Occupied Territories? How many would rush forward, photos of Israeli tanks demolishing Palestinian homes in hand, and denounce starvation and death in Gaza? I'll crawl out on a frail limb here and guess zero. Okay, maybe Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, and I'll toss in Danny Glover as well. But I can't think of many more who would dare portray Palestinians as human rights victims worthy of immediate support and solidarity, while excoriating the Israeli state for its ongoing strangulation of Gaza and continued building of West Bank settlements. There's also the minor fact that as American taxpayers, Hollywood celebs directly finance these atrocities, and so are more responsible for what they subsidize than what is fashionable in a PSA. I know -- pie in the exploding sky. Wake me when George Clooney narrates a documentary about the reality of Palestinian suffering. As to Israeli atrocities, I'm guessing he's talking about ones like this, courtesy of the US taxpayer. Sure Cletus, they hate us because we're free. Criminey - according to the "Mogambo Guru", the derivatives bubble is now close to 700 Trillion dollars. Another 300 Trillion and we get to use the word "Quadrillion" for the first time. Then we die. I wonder what would have happened if this guy had pulled the trigger... Asia Times: How under the gun Iran plays it cool. Under such conditions, what if there were an American air attack on Iran? The Supreme Leader, on the record, offered his own version of threats in 2006. If Iran were attacked, he said, the retaliation would be doubly powerful against US interests elsewhere in the world. From American supply lines and bases in southern Iraq to the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranians, though no military powerhouse, do have the ability to cause real damage to American forces and interests - and certainly to drive the price of oil into the stratosphere. Such a "war" would clearly be a disaster for everyone. The Iranian theocratic leadership, however, seems to doubt that the Bush administration and the US military, exhausted by their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will attack. They feel a tide at their backs. Meanwhile the "Look East" strategy, driven by soaring energy prices, is bearing fruit. Ahmadinejad has just concluded a tour of South Asia and, to the despair of American neo-cons, the Asian energy security grid is quickly becoming a reality. Two years ago, at the Petroleum Ministry in Tehran, I was told Iran is betting on the total "interdependence of Asia and Persian Gulf geo-economic politics". This year, Iran finally becomes a natural gas-exporting country. The framework for the $7.6 billion Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, also known as the "peace" pipeline, is a go. Both these key South Asian US allies are ignoring Bush administration desires and rapidly bolstering their economic, political, cultural, and - crucially - geostrategic connections with Iran. An attack on Iran would now inevitably be viewed as an attack against Asia. What a disaster in the making, and yet, now more than ever, Cheney's faction in Washington (not to mention possible future president John McCain) seems ready to bomb. Perhaps the Mahdi himself - in his occult wisdom - is betting on a US war against Asia to slouch towards Qom to be reborn. Iran drops US dollar. US draws up plans to attack. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, May 6, Tuesday. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, May 5, Moonday. Damn this effing Toshiba Laptop. I try to reinstall Windows with the recovery disks (with a 2003 date on them; they're supposed to be XP). For some reason it attempts to install windoze 98 (WTF?), then tells me that I've got the wrong machine. I check the labels, and, um, no - I do have the right machine. Toshiba's website is a joke - they don't even have this model listed on the US site. Thanks to Microsoft's abysmal TOS, it's not possible to buy replacement install disks (not that I would). I'll say it again: don't buy Toshiba. Enough on that topic. Time for a new laptop soon...then I'll wipe this brick and install Ubuntu on it for jollies. I've already booted it from CD, and it works like a champ. And, it's FREE. Lovely photos of a storm on Saturn. Some lovelies my lovelies:       Taking a laptop across the border, citizen? Take precautions. Hey, even if it's as simple as compressing your data into a big zip file, changing the extension to .tmp, then burying it deep in a windows folder...do you think the incompetent apes in DHS will find that? Speaking of...Air marshals grounded in list mix-ups Yes, America's descent into international laughing stock continues unabated. Ben Stein compares scientists to Nazis. Until he needs a hip replacement, the fundamentalist boob. Sad and amazing: Civil war cannonball kills relic collector. Think about this: a civil war weapon kills a man 150 years after it was fired. Now think of all the clusterbombs and landmines that our taxmoney has dropped on Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon over the last four years alone. Nice to know that some poor bastard will be eviscerated centuries after we're all dead.       The Coal Crunch is materialising. The Vice-President of the State Electric Power Supervisory Commission, Wang Yeping, said that in Hebei, Anhui, and Chongqing, the stockpile of coal for power generation was not even enough to last 7 days. This situation is quite similar to the one that existed in January 2008. Theoretically, a stockpile that is smaller than 7 days supply has reached an “urgent level”. Julian Darley: The day the gas dried up. John Michael Greer: Not the end of the world. A different perspective on collapse. The most polluted cities in the US. LA, you'll always be my number 1! Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, May 2, Friday. Some advice for you guys: don't buy a Toshiba Laptop. Now, to reformat my HD, and reinstall Windows. "I am just going outside and may be some time." Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. previous posts - about us - contact