30. mai 2003

This could be yours! Ever wanted to impress your neighbours with your own aircraft carrier? Want to conquer a banana republic? Dreamed about ending all maritime right-of-way quarrels decisively? This could all become true for only US$4,500,000. For that price, it's a steal! Only used by old admiral to church on Sundays. 10:12:22 PM    comment []

Cool flash intro The flash movie that serves as an intro to the Project UBB message board is easily one of the coolest I've seen. Req. sound. Better turn up the volume first! 9:44:01 PM    comment []

Anglican academic claims Jesus was gay A Melbourn "academic" will be awarded his PhD for a thesis on gay spirituality. Dr Rollan McCleary claims that Jesus and at least 3 of his disciples were gay. The basis? The compulsory 'clues in the scriptures' with a bit of 'proper translation' thrown in, and - get this - Jesus' astrological charts (I thought we needed a birthday for an astrological chart?). He said the planet Uranus figured prominently in Jesus's astrological chart, as it did with many gays. Sorry, It's just not possible to say with a straight face that anyone is gay based on Uranus. 9:19:57 PM    comment []

Sensitive employer The troubled British personal injury claims firm Accident Group today laid off 2,500 people. Many of them recived the bad news by mobile text messages (SMS), along with the news that there was not money to pay their latest salaries.. 5:41:51 PM    comment []

Blair rejects dossier accusations British prime minister Tony Blair rejected as 'asburd' claims that the British intelligence was pressured by the government to make the weapons dossier on Iraq 'sexier' by adding the claim that Saddam Hussein could activate the WMDs for use in just 45 minutes. An intelliegence source says that while other information in the dossier built on double sources, that claim built on only one source, and not a reliable one. But the official said he was convinced that Iraq had a programme to produce weapons of mass destruction, and felt it was 30% likely there was a biological weapons programme. He said some evidence had been "downplayed" by chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix. But Iraqi scientists captured during the war had not provided much information as yet, he added. Perhaps time to start playing some Metallica for those scientists, too, then. 4:48:22 PM    comment []

Headline of the day "Porn and music drive broadband" (BBC News headline) Basic human instincts, then, drive the net like every other part of the world. 12:51:49 PM    comment []

— Innocent men convicted for violence According to two Norwegian female lawyers, women are almost always believed and no emphasis is put on the man's version in cases of domestic violence. «In the 1980s we used to say that men convicted of incest were the innocents of the Norwegian prisons. Today we might say that the men convicted of subjecting women to violence are the victims of a miscarriage of justice», lawyer Marte Svarstad Brotkorb told Dagbladet. After domestic violence was largly ignored in the past, the pendelum may have been swinging too far in the opposite direction. Lawyer Heidi Ysen agrees, saying «It is regrettable that the juridical system does not require the same level of proof in cases of domestic violence as in other cases. It is also regrettable that a statement from the claimant is regarded as sufficient. I think many men are exposed to a miscarriage of justice and sadly, I do believe some women report assault in order to use it as a weapon in other conflicts within the relationship». Innocent until proven guilty. Not always, alas. 3:44:30 AM    comment []

White House "knows about" debt threat Critics of Bush's tax cut had some of their worst fears confirmed when outgoing White House spokesman Ari Fleischer matter-of-factly acknowledged that the result of the administration's policy is crushing deficits in the future. The White House said on Thursday it agreed with the conclusions of a study prepared by former Treasury officials that argued the US faced a future of chronic deficits worth at least $44,200bn. "We agree with their thoughts," Ari Fleischer, White House spokesman, told a press briefing. But the report underlined the need for big changes to benefits, rather than tax increases, he said. "There is no question that Social Security and Medicare are going to present [future] generations with a crushing debt burden unless policymakers work seriously to reform those programmes." The solution is not, in the minds of those right-wing policymakers, to raise taxes. It is to gut social programmes like Medicare and Social Security, reducing them substantially. Americans who lost their pensions through finanical collapse in the private sector last year can look forward to a substantial reduction of all social services from the public sector in the future, if the Republicans stay in power. It is ironic that what is anathema for Republicans, universal free or very cheap healthcare, is common in many European countries that are otherwise comparable to the US. And, perhaps surprisingly, these countries use less per capita on public healthcare than the US. 3:28:53 AM    comment []

Novell to SCO: You don't own those Unix copyrights! Another twist to the strange tale of SCO's recent war against IBM and the Linux community, when Novell announced today that it, and not SCO, owns the key Unix copyrights that SCO has been trying to cash in on. The announcement must have given pause to SCO executives, and sent the stock into a nosedive. SCO's "untruthful campaign caused the loss of sales and jobs, and damaged Linux companies and developers in a myriad of ways," said Bruce Perens, director of Software in the Public Interest, an open-source development organization that supports Linux advancement. "Novell has done us a tremendous service, by stomping upon an obnoxious parasite." SCO's actions are widely seen as pathetic, desperate and very destructive. Spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt in the open source community, it is pretty obvious it only benetifs the arch-enemy Microsoft. 2:31:15 AM    comment []

Life in Camp Delta The Telegraph's David Rennie has visited Camp Delta, the permanent replacement for Camp XRay on Guantanamo Bay. It is a prison camp designed to crush the revolutionary spirit of their detainees, he muses. The prisoners receive adequate care. He notes the medical facilities and the food are the same as that enjoyed by the MP guards. There is a call to prayer five times a day, and every inmate has a Koran, prayer beads and holy oil. Some things enrage and humiliate some of the prisoners, though. The watchtowers are covered in American flags. And, even worse, some of the soldiers who watch over them are female. That last part is, in my opinion, a beautiful irony, quite fitting for followers of a hateful misogynic Islamic sect. 2:15:25 AM    comment []

Some room for optimism We who live elsewhere can like it not, but our chance of economic recovery is closely tied to the US markets. The long awaited recovery from the double whammy of the dot-com bubble bursting and the 9/11 attacks is still looming under the surface. For more than two years, the markets have jumped on every ounce of good news and fallen back again on bad news. Economists were recently cautiously optimistic, as they say, that the end of the Iraq war would see a recovery. Consumer confidence in the US is slightly better than expected.  That is the driving force of every economy, and shows that some basics are still right. Maybe Bush's enormous tax cuts will help; more money in people's hands should mean they spend it on something. Heck, when you send the bill to the next generation, at least hope we get something for it. Unemployment remains quite high, though, and jobs are scarce. A slightly better life for the tech sector will hopefully bring in some jobs later this year, if it lasts. Indeed, ultumately jobs are based on consumer spending, so the future is not all dark. But we don't need shades yet. 12:54:32 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 Jan Haugland. Last update: 01.06.2003; 03:32:07.