… and here’s the actual speech from which this iambic pentameter was excerpted:

Well, maybe I’m right about Sarah Palin.  Now returning to watching the evil media exert its power to influence and informing the electorate, don’tchaknow.  At least she hired a speech writer this time.

UPDATE *** NBC in their infinite wisdom deleted this fantastic promotion of their new Tonight Show from YouTube, invoking a cat & mouse game with the evil demons of the interweb … I’ll try to update this with working versions over the next few days.  There is also, of course, a version on Hulu that is only available to Merkins.

Like Dennis, who loves and plays hockey a couple of times a week, Mike Myers wants to pay homage to this Canadian cultural tradition on film.  The NHL wants it, too.  It’s rumored to have a kitty up for grabs by filmmakers who want to make hockey the backdrop or the focus of their movies.

Mike Myers’ film is called “The Love Guru” and centers on a love triangle involving a woman and two professional hockey players.  At least hockey is in there, so many scenes might be shot in rinks and/or locker rooms, etc.  It might have hockey players floating around from scene to scene, but it’s not exactly about hockey, is it?

How many movies has the U.S. filmmaking industry generated that are centered around Football?  From “Any Given Sunday” to “Waterboy“, there is a list of more than 30 of them.  No one seems to want to make the same kinds of movies about hockey, detailing the tragedies and epic triumphs that occur just as frequently in hockey as in any other sport.

The NHL seems to think that movies are a way out of their image problem, but I suspect that the NHL’s image problem is why Hollywood has been reticent to green-light films about hockey.  That, coupled with the fact that Bettman has actually managed to diminish the NHL’s already minuscule audience under his tutelage.  Heck, even the NHL’s web traffic is a flat line:

Those few fans that do exist are vehement, and Kurt Russel, certainly no exception from that club, has even done his best to vaunt the sport into the American psyche be re-hashing the way-too-oft-retold tale of the US Olympic hockey team’s wacky victory over the evil Russians in 1980.   Why can’t the NHL leverage these to develop the sport’s image?

Mike Myers wants to kind of work hockey into a movie through the back door, but I’m not sure that putting Justin Timberlake in a hockey uniform for some romantic comedy is going to do any favors for the growth of the sport.

Putting a lid on broadband use By John Borland Staff Writer, CNET News.com http://news.com.com/2100-1034-5079624.html

Earlier this month, a Philadelphia Comcast broadband subscriber got a letter from his service provider, telling him he’d been using the Internet too much.

Keith, who asked to keep his full name private, said he’d subscribed to the service for four years and never had a complaint before. Now he was being labeled a network “abuser.”

Worse, he said, Comcast refused to tell him how much downloading was allowed under his contract. A customer service representative had told him there was no specific cap, he said, adding that he might avoid being suspended if he cut his bandwidth usage in half. But even then, the lack of a hard number gave Keith no guarantee.

What’s new: Cable Internet service subscribers are quietly capping the volume of downloading they allow their subscribers to do. So far, it’s only affecting the heaviest users.

Bottom line: As broadband providers strive for ever-speedier and economical service–and bandwidth-hogging features such as video on demand become more popular–these caps may become more common. And they may affect digital subscriber line (DSL) providers as well.

“I don’t mind restrictions, but how can Comcast expect users to stick to a limit when they don’t say what the limit is?” he said. “If they’re going to impose limits, that’s one thing, but at least tell us what they are.”

Keith isn’t alone in his newfound position under the Internet service provider (ISP) microscope. Other high-volume Comcast subscribers have been getting letters since late summer warning them of overuse. A few others have even had their service suspended after the first warning. Comcast spokeswoman Sarah Eder said that its new enforcement policy was barely two months old.

As Keith and other frustrated users found, the company’s warnings to subscribers were not triggered by any “predetermined bandwidth usage threshold,” Eder added. Only about 1 percent of subscribers received letters, which were based on having exceeded average usage patterns rather than a specific number, she said.

For now, this quiet imposition of usage caps affects only a tiny fraction of extraordinarily high-volume users. But it goes to the heart of the competitive decisions cable and telephone companies are making as they struggle for broadband dominance . Comcast in particular is working to provide ever-increasing download speeds , and as result it is struggling to contain busy file swappers and others who are putting stress on their networks.

It is not something the broadband providers are eager to talk about. Even as Comcast sends out letters to its customers targeting high-volume users, the company bristles at the notion that the policy is a cap.

It’s easy to see why: As cable and DSL companies race to bulk up on subscribers, companies tagged as “bandwidth cappers” could be at a disadvantage. The problem is particularly awkward for cable companies, which have tried to avoid a price war with the telephone companies by promising better quality of service.

“The industry is leery of explicit caps, because even people who don’t come anywhere near the caps feel like something is being taken away from them,” Jupiter Research analyst Joe Laszlo said. As consumers grow more used to broadband services and begin understanding what to expect from their connections, companies “can’t claim their service is unlimited if there is some kind of informal limit,” Laszlo added.

Hard caps and fuzzy ones Different ISPs are taking widely different approaches to this issue, although caps seem for now to be limited to the cable companies.

Cox Communications started phasing in hard usage limits in February, and now a majority of that company’s subscribers are limited to downloading 2 gigabytes a day–the equivalent of about two compressed feature-length movies or about 400 MP3 songs. AOL Time Warner’s Road Runner cable modem service has no caps yet, although sources say the idea is being discussed internally.

Comcast’s policy has proven most controversial. The company’s terms of service say only that users cannot “represent (in the sole judgment of Comcast) an unusually large burden on the network.” According to a spokeswoman, the company began sending notes about two months ago to the top 1 percent of the heaviest users–people who collectively use about 28 percent of the company’s bandwidth–telling them they were violating their terms of service.

Eder said there was no specific line crossed by these subscribers, but she added that some of those people were downloading the equivalent of 90 movies in a given month.

Comcast customer Keith, a British immigrant, said he used his cable modem service to watch the BBC, have video conversations and trade DVD-quality home movies with his family in the United Kingdom.

Comcast defended the policy of having the unstated–but still enforceable–limitation on bandwidth use, saying that any hard cap would have to change in any case as high-bandwidth applications such as video on demand became popular.

“The Internet is growing, and there are more broadband applications every day,” Eder said. “If we were to set an arbitrary number today, we could be changing it tomorrow.”

Both Cox and Comcast have a policy of sending warning letters to subscribers before suspending or terminating service. No subscriber would be affected without substantial warning, spokespeople from both companies said.

Some smaller cable companies are imposing much lower caps. Alaska’s GCI Cable , for instance, limits its subscribers to transferring just 5 gigabytes a month.

Telephone companies offering DSL service in the United States say they have no limits in place for their users, unlike Canadian, British or Australian counterparts that routinely cap their subscribers’ usage. Verizon Communications and SBC Communications, the largest DSL providers in the United States, both said their services remain unlimited.

“The customers buy the lines,” SBC spokesman Michael Coe said. “We make whatever bandwidth they need available to them.”

There’s a limit The caps are a small but crucial part in the latest round of skirmishing among broadband companies over price and features. Cable companies have had a lead in the consumer market for years, but they’re now nervously watching telephone companies’ DSL services–particularly co-branded offerings like the SBC Yahoo service–start to close the gap.

Both sides are trying to figure out how best to attract and then support the mainstream dial-up Internet audience, which is finally starting to come to broadband in droves.

DSL companies have brought deeply discounted prices into their arsenal. It’s now rare not to see a $29.95 per month offer from the likes of SBC or Verizon, and that’s helping bring subscribers in quickly. The cable companies, on the other hand, tout faster download speeds and Web surfing than the average DSL connection provides, and they are working to make their networks even faster.

Comcast, leading the way, has promised to double the average Net surfer’s top speeds, from 1.5 megabits per second to 3 megabits per second, and to get even faster in future years. Analysts say the drive to keep very high-volume users under control is necessary if the company is to reach this goal economically.

Most broadband subscribers use their service for some music or video downloading, to send and receive digital photos or for other high-bandwidth applications. But ISPs say that a tiny percentage of people are using an enormous percentage of their total bandwidth. According to Comcast, just 6 percent of subscribers use about 78 percent of the company’s bandwidth.

Cable networks are particularly susceptible to the dangers of this imbalanced usage, because all the homes in a given neighborhood share access to the same local network. One extremely high-volume user can therefore have a Net-slowing impact on his neighbors.

Nor are DSL companies exempt from this issue, despite their rhetorical distain for caps today. Even if their subscribers don’t share their local wires, DSL uploads and downloads do wind up merging into a shared network a little farther upstream, and so heavy users can wind up having a negative impact on others’ speeds.

For this reason, some analysts think that bandwidth usage caps will ultimately be a far more common part of the Net’s daily life, particularly at the lowest tiers of service.

“It’s partly just so the economics make sense,” Jupiter’s Laszlo said. “If you’ve got someone downloading 60 gigabytes a month and paying $29.95, it’s hard to make it work.”

Related News Broadband adoption skyrockets worldwide   September 16, 2003 http://news.com.com/2100-1034-5077230.html

Comcast: Faster downloads by year’s end   September 8, 2003 http://news.com.com/2100-1034-5072641.html

Survey: Users want DSL but can’t get it   August 6, 2003 http://news.com.com/2100-1023-5060701.html

Endless summer of DSL discounts   July 7, 2003 http://news.com.com/2100-1034-1023465.html

Get this story’s “Big Picture”

—— http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030411/wr_nm/ iraq_minister_website_dc

Web Site for Iraqi Minister Rocks Cyberspace Thu Apr 10, 8:30 PM ET Add Technology – Reuters Internet Report to My Yahoo!

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A member of Saddam Hussein (news – web sites)’s vanquished regime has sprung up as an unlikely hero in cyberspace on a Web site embraced by both supporters and foes of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq (news – web sites).

Television news junkies transfixed by daily briefings by Iraqi Minister of Information Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf are now logging onto a day-old Web site featuring his finest invective against U.S. and British “infidels.”

The site, (http:/www.WeLoveTheIraqiInformationMinister.com), is a “coalition effort of bloodthirsty hawks and ineffectual doves” united in their admiration for al-Sahaf and his pronouncements, such as: “I now inform you that you are too far from reality.”

Among al-Sahaf’s now-famous declarations was: “There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!”

Writer and former Greenpeace activist Kieran Mulvaney, a Briton living in Alaska, said he and friends got the idea for the site while watching cable news coverage of the three-week-old war.

“I mentioned to one of my friends that the best part is watching this guy,” Mulvaney told Reuters on Thursday. “He is so brazen that I could almost admire him.”

Mulvaney and his friends designed, built and put up the site in three days. Within hours of going live on the Internet, the site “has exploded,” Mulvaney said. The same day, U.S. troops marched into Baghdad and al-Sahaf disappeared, or in the view of his new Web site, went on “administrative leave.”

“I hope he is alive somewhere so he knows how famous he has become,” Mulvaney said. “We’ve had all kinds of e-mail from literally all over the world. We even had a few e-mails from within the Pentagon (news – web sites) saying, ‘We really like this guy and we miss him.”‘

The site already is offering T-shirts and mugs bearing al-Sahaf’s best-loved statements (“My feelings — as usual — we will slaughter them all!”) and has selected actor and director Sydney Pollack to play the information minister in the Hollywood version of the war.

In the meantime, Mulvaney said he will appeal for sightings of al-Sahaf, and there are plans to poll fans about what the beret-wearing minister should do after the war.

One fan has advocated an urgent campaign to spare al-Sahaf if he is found: “He is too much of a global asset to be murdered/shot/stabbed or otherwise wasted.”

> From: “DM”
> Date: Mon Mar 17, 2003 11:19:29 AM US/Pacific
> To: “Ian Andrew Bell”
> Subject: FW: MORE DIXIE CHICKS
>
> And a little more on the Dixie Babes…
>
>  
>
>  
>
> Subject:MORE DIXIE CHICKS
>
>  
>
> Subject: THIS IS SCARY – The Dixie Chicks – Who Are The Fans? (A
> Conspiracy!)
>
> Simon Renshaw, the Chicks’ manager, requests that this get forwarded to
> you, since he doesn’t have your direct E-mails.
>
> Dear All,
>
> The last couple of days have been very interesting, why does an artist
> exercising her rights of free speech create such a firestorm of media
> attention, and why are the “fans” responding the way they are? Sure,
> these are difficult times ? but the response from the fan’s seems far
> too extreme
> – that was until I received the following email from our contacts at
> Lipton, who had received it from a concerned citizen -  please read > on:
>
> Subject: Regarding Chicks – DO NOT BE INTIMIDATED
>
> Hello
>
> You should know that your company is being targetted by a radical
> right-wing online forum.  You are being “FReeped”, which is the code
> word for an organized email/telephone effort attempting to solicit a
> desired response. Please go to
> http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/864728/posts
> and http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/863398/posts
>
> for evidence of this.
>
> www.freerepublic.com claims over 30,000 members.
>
> The opinions on this forum are often racist, violent, and homophobic.
> I hope you will not feel pressured by them to change your policies.
> Keep in mind that they are very active and will give the appearance of
> a widespread reaction when in fact it’s limited to their isolated
> group. These are not people you want to cater to, as you will see if
> you spend a little time observing them. And don’t feel bad. Besides
> you, they are boycotting Canada, France, Germany, Russia, Mexico,
> Belgium, and 3/4 of hollywood.
>
> They are so petty that they research goods they believe are produced
> by these nations and list them for boycotting. The dumb thing is they
> get it wrong half the time.
>
> I will be very dissappointed with Lipton if it tries to appease these
> radicals. I would continue to buy Lipton regardless though 🙂
>
> When we went to the site it was clear what was going on, this
> organization had not targeted Lipton for their campaign, they had
> selected the Chicks for “FReeping.”
>
> As we reviewed the site we came across a whole area that was devoted
> to the Chicks, and more specifically the activities of the campaign
> against them, check it out:
>
> http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/keyword/dixiechicks
>
> As you move around this area and start to look at specific threads you
> will see that these people have actively manipulated radio polls, and
> how proud they are of their handiwork.
>
> Here’s some of their exchanges regarding their specific attempts to
> manipulate radio polls, notice the advice given on trying to ensure
> that their manipulations remain disguised:
>
> To: webfooter
>
> Cat Country in Harrisburg has a poll on whether they should stop
> playing the Chicks. They attribute the quote to Natalie.
>
> Current vote is 5 for and 5 against.
> I would recommend only locals vote, but you FReepers can do what you
> want.
> Shalom.
>
> To: webfooter; LindaSOG; Kathy in Alaska; radu; bentfeather;
> southerngrit;
> Bethbg79; All
>
> One of the country stations in my area is boycotting them: Here’s the
> link! Please freepmail them thanks! I have done so already!!
>
> WCMS
>
>
> 38 posted on 03/13/2003 1:52 PM PST by MoJo2001 (God Bless Our Troops
> and Allies!!)
> [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies ]
>
> To: All
>
> LOL!! Um, email them! Don’t freepmail them! My bad!
>
> 39 posted on 03/13/2003 1:52 PM PST by MoJo2001 (God Bless Our Troops
> and
> Allies!!)
> [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 38 | View Replies ]
>
> To: MoJo2001
>
> FReep Natalie Maines’ hometown country station! Natelie Maines’ home
> radio station (KLLL.com) and email address of the DJ’s. Just in case
> anybody wants to drop them a friendly email about boycotting the
> Chicks. As a bonus, pappa and the family live here too, so you are
> sure to get noticed.
>
> And here are the emails:
> mailto:jonsteele [at] klll [dot] com (Jon Steele)
> mailto:Rgilbert [at] klll [dot] com (Rick Gilbert)
> mailto:sjames [at] klll [dot] com (Stacey James)
> mailto:tony [at] klll [dot] com (Tony Alexander)
> mailto:info [at] klll [dot] com (Jay Richards)
> mailto:kgreene [at] klll [dot] com (Kelly Greene)
> mailto:tommy [at] klll [dot] com (Tommy Duncan)
>
>
> The above is the tip of the iceberg,  you need to read it all, to
> believe it.
>
> It is interesting that as I review the comments being made across
> bulletin boards hosted by ourselves, country radio stations, and by
> CMT, the similarity of the style of the invective ? vitriol cloaked in
> patriotism, very much what you will find on this site.
>
> Let no one underestimate the power of this group, yesterday our web
> site was totally overrun and had to be closed down, our publicist’s
> servers and telephone system failed under the weight of the calls.
> This is an extremely active and well organized group
>
> As always the “squeaky wheel gets the grease” and these weasels know
> how to squeak.
>
> Consider a radio station that receives 1,000 calls and emails from
> listeners demanding that they boycott the Chicks music, they ignore
> the fact that 17,500 fans have bought tickets to a show in a couple of
> months and seem to think that these 1,000 calls/emails are somehow
> reflective of their audiences’ wishes. Yet, the box office at the
> local venue receives only 3 calls regarding the show and wanting to
> know if they can arrange to return the tickets! Now the authenticity
> of the 1,000 is in question!
>
> I am shocked by what I see, I trust you will be too.
>
> Best wishes,
> Sr
>
> Simon Renshaw
> The Firm
> 9465 Wilshire Blvd
> 5th Floor
> Beverly Hills, CA 90212
> Tel: 310-860-8205
> Fax: 310-860-8128
> Email: srenshaw [at] firmentertainment [dot] net
>
>
>
>
> RadioPro (TM)
>

The decline and fall of the American empire An expert on geopolitics says forget Islamic terrorism — the real future threat to America’s supremacy will come from Europe.

– – – – – – – – – – – – By Suzy Hansen

Dec. 2, 2002 | The title of Charles A. Kupchan’s new book, “The End of the American Era,” sounds grim, but after a year of terrorist violence, “spectacular” attack warnings and ominous analyses of fundamentalist Islam, his argument is almost refreshing. According to Kupchan, a professor of international relations at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, it isn’t radical Islam that we should be most concerned about. It’s our friends across the Atlantic, the European Union, that pose the greatest threat to American primacy.

In “The End of the American Era,” Kupchan compares the current world situation to past turning points in history — the end of World War I, the federation of the American colonies, the Great Depression — to suggest ways in which the world might transform itself. In some of his most illuminating passages, Kupchan disputes the predictions of such optimistic leading thinkers as Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman, who perceive democracy and globalization as great panaceas, and pessimists such as Samuel Huntington who foresees a “clash of civilizations.” Instead, Kupchan’s global map resembles that of the 19th century, when the reigning empire, Great Britain, gave the rising United States entree as a world power. This time, Kupchan says, it’s America’s turn to make room for Europe.

Kupchan spoke to Salon from his office in Washington, D.C.

I know historians and scholars hate the word “inevitable,” but you imply that sooner or later all great empires will fall. Is that right?

If there’s any trend that keeps coming back, it’s that great powers come and go. No one stays at the top forever. Rome was a great empire with a huge territory under its weight for probably 300 to 400 years, which is a pretty long time. Some have come and gone much more quickly.

One of the reasons that America’s moment at the top will be short-lived is that history is moving much more quickly than it used to. The countries that get into the digital age go into fast-forward. If you take a snapshot of the world today and say, “A-ha! This is what the world’s going to look like for the next century,” it’s very dangerous. Tomorrow could look very different.

Which empire do we compare most to? Is it Rome?

Two analogies come to my mind as most insightful to the present. First, the Roman case. The split that we’re now seeing between Europe and America reminds me of the split between Rome and Byzantium that occurred in the end of the third century and into the fourth century. You had a unitary imperial zone divided into two, and once you had two separate capitals, Rome and Constantinople, you immediately had rivalry rather than unity. The same thing is happening between Washington and Brussels.

As far as the nature of our empire, I’d say the British probably comes closer to ours. The Roman empire was more contiguous. We have a more far-flung empire that relies on offshore balancing, which is what the Brits did: Send troops abroad but more to keep the balance than to occupy. You could almost call it Empire Lite. That’s more or less how we run the show. One of the benefits of that is that Empire Lite is cheaper and it also provokes less resistance.

But one of the real dangers that we face at the moment is that Empire Lite might become Empire Heavy and rather than reassure others, we’ll alienate them. Rather than appear as a benign hegemon, we appear predatory. We appear to lose our legitimacy as a great power, which is probably our most precious commodity. If that happens, then all bets are off. Then you really see countries run for cover and join arms against the United States.

What mistakes do historians and scholars make when they say that America is different, that for some reason American primacy will last indefinitely?

Part of it stems from looking at what I would say are the wrong indicators. They look at the GDP and the military capability of the United States vs. other countries. If you do that, it doesn’t look like anybody is going to come close for many decades. I agree with that. But Europe is no longer a group of sovereign countries; it’s coming together just like [the United States] did [in the 18th century]. That’s why you have to talk about Europe as a collective entity and its ability to serve as a counterweight to the United States.

Also, oftentimes historians and particularly political scientists tend to look at the world structurally. They say, “Forget about what’s going on inside states and just look at the relations among states.” The end of America’s dominance will to some extent be made in America. It will come from America’s domestic politics, its own ambivalence about empire and its own stiff-necked unilateralism, which alienates others. In that sense, a lot of where we go as a country will come from internal factors — demographics, politics, political culture, populism. Those are issues that lots of political scientists don’t pay attention to.

Now, is that a trend that you see happening regardless of what political party is in power?

Yes. That’s a debate that I have with my colleagues here because they say, “Listen. Once the Bushies are gone everything will be fine. If Gore had won, everything would be fine.” I don’t agree. If Gore had won, the changes we are seeing now would have taken longer to come about, but both parties face the same political pressures in the end. If the Democrats win by 2015, it doesn’t matter. We’ll be in the same place.

Still, you’re basing a lot of your argument on what you’ve seen in the last year, aren’t you? The idea that American intervention and multilateralism is on the wane … that has a lot to do with what happened in the last year. And that’s just one year.

Interestingly enough, I wrote the first draft of the book before Bush was elected. The core themes were all there. What I’m quite shocked by is the speed with which all of this has happened. I thought that my general analysis would take a good decade to play out. Once Bush came to office it seemed like someone stepped on the gas. I had to rewrite the book and I put much more emphasis on America’s turning inward and its ambivalence about running the world. After Sept. 11, the unilateralists’ angry lashing-out side came back. The emphasis in the book on that was written after Bush came to office, and after Sept. 11.

So you think this trend might slow down with Democrats — if they’re ever in power again — but not halt.

Yes, and that’s partly because when I was in the Clinton administration in the early 1990s — only a few years after the end of the Cold War — I already saw trends that were seeds for the book. Congress was beginning to check out. The media was stopping its coverage of foreign affairs. Even Clinton, who was a liberal internationalist by inclination, wasn’t so wild about the Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal Court and all this other stuff that the Bush people said no to. When it all comes down to it, I see the arrows all pointing in one direction, but the emphasis and the speed changes from party to party.

Part of your theory is that now we see isolationist and unilateralist extremes working at the same time. The alternative you propose is liberal internationalism? What does that mean? What conflicts would we have engaged in during the 1990s, and now, if we followed that line of thought?

The world I envisage is one where the U.S. enters a period of transition in which it helps other actors build up the capability to do what we’ve been doing. I just don’t believe that, given American politics, we will intervene in [situations such as] Rwanda and East Timor. I don’t think that’s the way the world works. Rather than no one doing it, we ought to work toward a world in which there are alternative centers of authority with the will and capability to do peacekeeping and intervention. I would love to see the European Union get to the point where it can take care of Kosovo and the Balkans. I’d love to see some sort of association of African states that could go into a Rwanda-type activity. The U.S. will no doubt remain willing and able to intervene in the Western hemisphere, but my view is that intervention far afield will diminish over time with a couple of exceptions — where there are clear strategic interests like Northeast Asia and the Persian Gulf.

How does the Bush administration’s desire to attack Iraq fit into these trends? You did write that we would be staying home and shoring up defenses post-Sept. 11, but here we are ready to wage another war already. What does this war represent?

The political landscape is so skewed that the unilateralist camp is essentially unchecked. In the Republican Party, there are three ideological camps: the neoconservatives, who are unilateralists; the moderate centrists, who are essentially liberal internationalists of the sort that I advocate such as Father Bush, Brent Scowcroft, Henry Kissinger; and this new, young ascendant wing of the Republican Party represented by President Bush. That’s the heartland wing — the agrarian South and the mountain West. It’s populous and its inclinations are neo-isolationist.

That’s why from Jan. 20 to Sept. 11 the centrist wing was pushed to the margins and the neoconservatives and the heartland conservatives were duking it out. That’s why one day Bush would say we can’t be everything to everybody and the next day Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz at the Pentagon would say, “We’re going to run the world.” Then comes Sept. 11 and the heartland conservatives have their legs cut off. So right now there’s no check on the neoconservatives and the Democratic Party has folded its tent, lost the midterm elections. That’s why there’s so little debate about Iraq. That doesn’t mean, however, that the heartland wing is gone. They’re in suspension now politically, but they will be back.

The other thing that is important on Iraq is that the Bush administration could, if it’s not careful, find itself in over its head and have a set of commitments on its plate — including a five- to 10-year occupation of Iraq — that ultimately causes a political backlash in which the American people say enough already.

Could that scenario speed up this whole process of the decline of the American era?

It depends on how it goes. If the war goes smoothly and Saddam falls and all goes well and there aren’t chemical weapons exploding in Tel Aviv, I think it will probably turn out OK and not change the landscape all that much. If anything, it will fuel the neoconservative view.

If it goes poorly … I think the war will go smoothly actually. What I really worry about is the occupation. You ought to see a therapist if you want to occupy Iraq. It’s just the last place I would want to set up shop. The whole region is deeply anti-American. They’ll probably be dancing in the streets for 24 to 48 hours and then they’ll take up sniper positions. That’s where I think things could go wrong with barracks exploding, etc. If that were to happen, at the end of the day it would cause us to pull in our horns and cause Americans to say, “What have we gotten ourselves into?”

And our main challenger, in your view, is not radical Islam or Saddam Hussein, but the European Union. What kind of threat do you really see the European Union posing? Do you ever see us going to war with Europe?

To work backwards, no. The likelihood of military conflict between the U.S. and Europe is very low, almost beyond the stretch of imagination. The main threat is to order. The main threat is to the stability of the world. Everyone right now is focusing on terrorism and environmental degradation, and I’m all for those things. But we’ve gotten complacent about the big picture. We’re used to a world where America runs the show. We may wake up one morning and find that we don’t have complete control, that we go to the IMF or the World Bank or the United Nations, and say, “Here’s our plan for the next week.” And the E.U. looks at us and says, “We’re not onboard. We’re not going to do that.”

In fact, everyone saw the recent voting at the U.N. Security Council as victory for the U.S. But what really happened? The U.S. went in and said, “This is our position, take it or leave it.” Most of the Security Council, save Britain, said, “Leave it.” They locked arms with France rather than with us, which is what they’ve been doing for the last 50 years. That’s just the beginning of what the world could look like — main powers not working together. If it comes to that, then these other threats will diminish in importance and pale in comparison to a world in which the key players are no longer on the same sheet of music, in which Europe sets itself against us, rather than with us.

The illusion, however, is that we control the major international organizations. Also, we seem to be reaching out to NATO. How could we lose control of them?

We still do control them, but that control is slipping away in several respects. First of all, we see major institutions devolving against our wishes. The E.U. takes the lead and says, “You want to drive SUVs and drill wells in the Alaska wilderness? Well, we’re going to go ahead with the Kyoto Protocol without you. You don’t like the International Criminal Court? We’ll do it without you.” Does it hurt the ICC that we’re not there? Yes. But does it also start building a world where you have these other countries coming together with major steps forward and we’re not there? Yes. Does that degrade order? Yes.

In existing institutions we’ll find ourselves increasingly isolated. One of the reasons that we tend to have as much say as we do is that, for example, in the IMF, the U.S. has a larger share than any other country. But that’s because the countries are represented solely by their country representatives. If the E.U. starts coming together with its own single representative, then we will no longer be the dominant country. We’re not going to be able to go in and pound our fist on the table anymore.

It’s a subtle shift that I’m talking about and that’s why most people say, “Oh, it’s nothing compared to Osama bin Laden.” But, on the other hand, it’s the superstructure, it’s the guts of the international system, and that’s why the stakes are so high.

What issues and conflicts will we diverge on with the E.U.? The Middle East?

That’s probably the area where the U.S. and Europe most disagree. It’s quite striking if you go to Europe and turn on the TV. The presentation of the Arab-Israeli conflict is so different that you scratch your head and say, “What part of the world are they talking about?” That’s part of the problem. We reside in different mind-sets.

The trade and monetary issues will grow more difficult over time if the euro gradually rises. It’s a real challenger to the dollar. That’s going to make us look like we’re back in the 1930s where you had the pound sterling and the dollar together and the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of England trying to manage jointly the international economy. It didn’t work; the two went off in their own direction. Now it’s going to be the Federal Reserve vs. the European Central Bank. If we don’t get that relationship right, there could be very serious implications. We are so used to being alone at the top that it’s going to be hard for us to get used to that.

Where will England stand in all of this? They’re our best friends these days.

The Brits are right now trying to have their cake and eat it too. They’re kind of edging into the E.U. but also playing the traditional role of bridge to America. Those days are numbered. It’s a strategy that will diminish over time in terms of its utility, but also in terms of its political feasibility. The Brits will change their strategy to trying to change the Franco-German coalition into the Franco-German-British troika. That’s because if the Brits don’t get into the driver’s seat in Europe, they’ll be marginalized. My guess is that by 2005 and certainly by the end of the decade, the Brits will be buying their fish and chips with euros and they will be one of the engines behind European integration rather than lagging behind.

When Bush said you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists, was he trying to create a new map of the world, one that’s black and white and similar to the Cold War bipolar world? It’s almost nostalgic for the Cold War. Why would he want to do that, and why can’t that work with terrorism?

Part of it may be instrumental. It’s a useful talking point for both domestic and international politics. Part of it is sincere — the Bush people really do believe the world has changed and that it’s all about terrorism and either you are against the terrorists or with them.

First of all, that grossly distorts the implications of Sept. 11, in that I don’t think the world has changed all that much. Beneath the surface, the same old agenda is still relevant, it’s just got one new thing on it: terrorism. If we’re terrorism 24/7 we’re going to miss all those other issues. We’re going to miss the fact that we’re alienating the Europeans, we’re going to miss the fact that we have a potential environmental disaster looming on the horizon.

The other problem is that terrorism is a very weak reason upon which to build American internationalism. That’s partly because it’s not the type of threat that — similar to the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan — gets us riled up for the long haul. It’s elusive. We’re in this weird zone where we’re being told we’re at war but when asked what should we do about it, we’re supposed to go shopping and take vacations so that our planes have people on them. It doesn’t quite click. Something’s not right about this story. Some of the greatest successes in this battle will be the ones we never hear about — covert operations, the averted attack — and so in that sense, it’s very tough to get this country into a mode of centrist moderate internationalism on terrorism.

I also think — and this definitely cuts against the grain for now — that ultimately there will be a counterresponse. Right now, it’s, “Let’s go get the barbarians,” but over time there will be an alternative voice that says, “Let’s raise protective barriers, let’s get out of some of our overseas commitments.” Going back to the founding fathers, we can, because of our location, enjoy a sort of natural security.

Where’s that voice going to come from? The left or the right?

It’s going to come from all different quadrants. More from the right and the heartland than from the left. I make a point to give talks in Kansas and Texas, Birmingham and Nashville, and there’s just a different view of the world there. Even people who are involved in the international economy are not quite as gung ho about the American empire as we hear in Washington today. That’s why over time that voice will gain strength. It’s important to keep in mind that if you look at how other countries have responded to terrorism or how we have responded, sometimes it does make you pull in your horns. We got out of Lebanon in 1983, we left Aden when the Cole was bombed; Nigerian attacks on the French mainland got the French to leave Algeria. It’s not particularly politically correct to say so, but terrorism does engender one to hunker down.

What other alliances might we see? Where does China fit in all this?

In the near term, the main actor is Europe because it has the clout, population and economic weight. It’s beginning to have the collective character as the states pass more and more authority up to the supranational authority.

I spent less time on China in the book because most people exaggerate China’s importance. China is still a relatively small country economically with an economy smaller than California’s. Ten years from now China will be an Italy with nuclear weapons. Once you get into the second quarter of the century, 2025 and beyond, then China starts to begin to take its place as one of the top-ranking countries. Then, you might spend a lot more time worrying about China.

But, what do I think the most volatile relationship will be, the one that changes most this decade? It’s U.S.-Europe.

How will that affect ordinary Americans? What changes will we see if it’s not a military threat? I mean, the American people can’t see past terrorism right now because we can see very clearly what that threat is.

I’d say that right across the board there are some consequences. The trade and investment with Europe is very strong and healthy. If that becomes politicized it could be a problem. There are already looming disputes over biotech, bioengineered greens.

The disputes on other areas — on the Middle East, on Iran, on Iraq — could lead to trouble. NATO, which has been our main tool in influencing Europe, is withering on the vine, partly of our own doing. We’re just losing interest in Europe.

I’d probably put it in these terms: Europe will be our competitor but not necessarily our adversary. That’s why we’re in a switching point where we really have to get it right. Negotiating a treaty, rebuilding Afghanistan, dealing with the Middle East process — all that stuff usually moves forward with the U.S. taking the lead and Europe backing off. If we wake up one day and the U.S. tries to take the lead and Europe tells us to take a hike, then we’re in a brave new world. Doing business on a day-to-day basis becomes much more difficult. At the broadest level, all the money and lives that we expended since World War II to tame the international system and give it a benign character — all of that’s at stake. It’s possible that we could wake up and it will be 1935 and I don’t think any American wants that.

You do say that the unipolar world that we have now is a peaceful one and historically unipolar worlds are always peaceful. You say that a world without American primacy will be an unpredictable and unpleasant world. For everyone, or just for Americans?

Everybody. Even though a lot of countries wouldn’t necessarily say so, they’ve had a pretty good deal. Big Daddy’s been there and he takes care of everything. The Europeans don’t have to spend much on defense. China and Japan basically don’t like each other, but they’re not gnawing at each other’s heels because the U.S. keeps a presence there. We provide stability. What we’re seeing now is the end of that. The U.S. is decamping from Europe because we’ve got nothing else to do there, but it does leave the Europeans with the new onerous task of taking care of themselves. That’s going to be scary for them even though there’s a certain schizophrenia. The Europeans are annoyed with us but scared of what Europe will look like without the American pacifier. In the same respect, the Saudis believe that the U.S. destabilizes them but what happens if the U.S. leaves? The stakes are very high.

I’ll take a wild guess that most Americans will be surprised that Europe might challenge us. Are Europeans?

Depends on what you mean. They will never be a superpower; they’re never going to spend the money to rival the U.S. in military terms. What we’ll see is that they will build up enough capability to take care of the Balkans and other small conflicts, and the U.S. will take care of other parts of the world. Sort of a division of labor. But that division of labor means the end of the Atlantic alliance.

You say most Americans will be surprised at this and I think that’s right. I don’t think most Europeans will be. This issue gets much more traction there. They are engaged in international issues in ways that we are now. There is this abiding sense that we’re all in the same family, that these are our cousins. That’s probably what will keep us from going to war, but it’s not going to keep us from drifting apart.

So how do you fear that America might react to this?

The worst that we can do is bite back. The historical analogy that is most useful here is what happened in the 19th century when America rose because it federated. Basically, history is reversing itself: This time we’re at the top and Europe is coming together, last time Europe was at the top and we came together. There wasn’t war over America’s rise because the British made room for us. They cut deals on all kinds of issues and they said we need to have a rapprochement with the rising great power, America. We ought to do the same thing.

We ought to say: Europe is rising, Europe wants voice, influence, and we’re going to make room. I don’t think that we’ve been doing that. We’re still in the mode of “How dare you challenge us?” Probably the best anecdote is about the E.U. Defense Force. The U.S. fought the war over Kosovo, and then Congress said, “This is ridiculous. This is not our problem. Europe, you need to spend more and build your own military.” So Europe said, “OK.” And then the U.S. went bonkers: “What do you mean you’re going to build your own military? You don’t love us anymore?”

Europe is growing up and leaving home to go to college and we’re just not ready for it. We ought to say, “Go to college, be independent, and just call us once a year or something.”

But you don’t think that terrorism is the unifying great threat that it’s been made out to be?

No. Everyone was saying, “Aha, the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century!” This couldn’t be further from the truth. We have quite rapidly drifted back to disengagement.

Couldn’t a couple more attacks change that?

Yes. That’s the big unknown. If a nuclear weapon goes off, God forbid, if there’s another catastrophic attack, then I think we’re in a brave new world. Do I think it will bring the country together and make us internationalist? I don’t know. It could also make us pull in and retreat. It’s dangerous to be confident that terrorism is the sort of threat that will keep us engaged in the world. It does the opposite — pushing us to both unilateralist and isolationist extremes.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

About the writer Suzy Hansen is an assistant editor at Salon.

———–

Microsoft Creating Virtual Brain Fri Nov 22, 1:02 PM ET James Maguire, www.NewsFactor.com

Researchers at Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT – news) Media Presence Lab are developing a “virtual brain,” a PC-based database that holds a record of an individual’s complete life experience. Called MyLifeBits, the project aims to make this database of human memories searchable in the manner of a conventional search engine.

“By 2047, almost all information will be in cyberspace — including all knowledge and creative works,” said one of the project’s leaders, Gordon Bell. “The most significant benefit will be a breakthrough in our ability to remotely communicate with one another using all our senses.”

To enable this remote communication, Bell’s group is developing a technology that he refers to as telepresence. “Telepresence technology provides for both space and time shifting by allowing a user to communicate with other users via text, graphics, voice, video and shared program operation.”

Multimedia Synapses

The core of the MyLifeBits project is an online PC-based system that holds everything that can be digitally stored about an individual. Microsoft researchers refer to it as a sort of “virtual shoebox” that holds all of a person’s e-mail, home movies, meeting details and other memorabilia.

Unlike a real shoebox, say the researchers, MyLifeBits would allow a user to input a keyword like “pet” to see and hear all material relating to a childhood pet.

In effect, MyLifeBits would allow a user to run a Google (news – external web site) search on his or her life. The database would be searchable in many ways, including by date, allowing a businessperson to find all communications associated with a given meeting, for instance.

MyLifeBits also would be capable of creating personal narratives by cross-referencing chronological material related to two or more people in an individual’s life.

It’s All About Me

“It sounds like weblogging run amuck,” Aberdeen Group analyst Dana Gardner told NewsFactor, explaining that the current trend toward Internet self-expression sometimes veers toward the obsessive.

Yet Gardner also sees the value of MyLifeBits, especially as a time capsule for future historians.

He noted that there is currently an overcapacity problem in network fiber, storage and processing capability. “We need to find the application that will utilize the infrastructure that’s available, and this sounds like a way of doing that,” he said.

Guinea Pig

Microsoft researcher Bell is himself the guinea pig for the prototype system. He is uploading a massive amount of personal memorabilia, from his trips to Alaska to his biking excursions in France. All of his e-mail is stored on the system, as is his passport, all of his work documents, and recordings of all of his phone calls.

Each of his myriad media files is tagged with a verbal or written identifier, allowing them to be cross-linked to other files. His spoken tags are converted into text files to make them searchable.

Bell said he believes that in the future, this process will be streamlined. “We can optimistically assume that by 2010, speech input and output will be ubiquitous and available for every system that has electronics,” he said.

Computer Memory – and Security

One of the project’s chief logistical hurdles involves developing a cost-effective system with the memory capacity of the human mind.

The Microsoft researchers forecast that within five years, a 1,000 GB hard drive will cost less than $300. While this would provide enough capacity to store up to four hours of video per day for a year, it is still not enough to store all of an individual’s experiences.

Ensuring the security of MyLifeBits is also a crucial concern, especially given the sensitive nature of the data to be archived. Because the system would be online, making it “hack proof” would be critical before MyLifeBits could become viable in the mass market.

Microsoft representatives were not immediately available for comment.

Work in Process

Jim Gemmell, one of the project’s other leaders, described some of the problems with creating this vast archive. “Indexing and retrieval of photographs and video clips can be a headache,” he said.

However, Gemmell added, “When it gets too frustrating to find something, you can always watch some of some classic movies you’ve captured from DVDs.”

———–

—— Forwarded Message From: Ray Le Maistre Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 09:45:49 -0000 To: ‘Ian Andrew Bell’ Subject: RE: What would you do without your phone or e-mail?

======================================================== http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4369605,00.html

THE ENEMA WITHIN

Ian Belcher took some persuading to go on a colonic irrigation holiday, even at a Thai beach resort. It is, he discovered, quite astonishing what gets flushed out in the course of a week’s treatment. But did he feel the better for it?

Ian Belcher Guardian

Saturday March 9, 2002

When photographer Anthony Cullen heard the clank of glass on porcelain, he didn’t need to examine the contents of the toilet bowl between his legs. He instinctively knew he had just passed the marble he had swallowed as a five-year-old; the small coloured sphere – “I think it was a bluey” – had lodged in his colon for 22 years. His nonchalance was understandable. Having flushed 400 pints of coffee and vinegar solution around his large intestine through 10 enemas, and taken 100 herbal laxatives, he had become hardened to extraordinary sights. He had already excreted yards of long stringy mucus “with a strange yellow glaze”, several hard black pellets and numerous pieces of undigested rump steak. Like an iceberg breaking away from a glacier, the marble was simply the latest object to drop off the furred up wall of his colon.

Within 30 minutes it had become a burning topic of conversation among guests at The Spa resort on the Thai island of Koh Samui. Most listened, nodded earnestly and smiled, a flicker of mutual support, before describing their own bowel movements in unnervingly graphic detail. It was just another day at the tropical health farm where conversations that would be deemed unpleasant, if not obscene, in any place outside a gastro-intestinal ward, are mere idle chit-chat among the sun-soaked clientele.

They may have travelled across the world to The Spa’s thatched beach huts, encircling its renowned restaurant whose Pod Ka Pow Nam Many Hoy – prawns and chilli, stir-fried in oyster sauce – is a house speciality, but not a morsel of food, nor a single calorie, will pass their lips. Instead they order around 70-odd gallons of coffee and vinegar, lemon or garlic solution – lightly warmed, please waiter – to be squirted up their anus. You are unlikely to find this particular dish on Masterchef.

The roots of their truly alternative activity holiday lie in our modern lifestyle. Some doctors, such as Richard Anderson, inventor of the Clean-Me-Out Programme, claim our high stress existences and over-processed diets – chips, pizzas, burgers – have left us with clogged-up digestive systems. And that, according to advocates of intestinal cleansing, makes us disease time bombs, at increased risk from cancer, heart trouble, infertility, diabetes, premature ageing and, pass the smelling salts this instant, wrinkles.

Their solution is to fast: to put nothing in one end, while simultaneously purifying yourself by propelling significant amounts of liquid up the other. “It’s like changing the oil in your car,” says Guy Hopkins, the 60-year-old owner of The Spa, whose eyes glint with evangelical zeal when he talks about colonic irrigation. “If you don’t do it every so often [your body] isn’t going to run that well. We constantly put the wrong fuel in our bodies and, sure, they keep on going, but cleanse yourself and you’ll be amazed how much better you’ll feel.”

A tempting sales pitch, yet when my editor suggested a first-person report, I had grave reservations. As someone whose only concessions to healthy eating had involved switching from butter to olive oil and occasionally cutting the fat off my steak, the fast sounded frankly insane. Then I began hearing about the “lifestyle benefits” of the cleanse, of the 90-degree heat and tropical beaches. Words such as “de-stressing” and “life-changing” were tossed around.

I weakened, dithered and finally relented. The photographer, Anthony, it was agreed, must also fast.

Our preparation began well before we spotted our first palm tree. The Spa recommended we prepared with a fortnight of abstinence from meat, processed foods (adios my daily staples, pasta and bread), milk, cheese, booze, coffee or soft drinks. Instead, our gastric juices were stimulated by salads, fruit, slightly cooked vegetables, herb teas and water.

It wasn’t easy. Both Anthony and myself are what might charitably be termed “stocky”, enjoying cooking and, more importantly, eating. Within days, food, or lack of it, had become an obsession. We had long phone discussions about interesting ways to grill aubergine; Anthony bragged about his spicy ratatouille. Life was changing.

As the first toxins were expelled and severe caffeine withdrawal set in, I experienced headaches, aching muscles, a lack of energy, and an increasingly short temper. I also faced a new menace: the liver flush drink. Designed to sluice out your system, it’s a vile mix of olive oil, raw garlic, and cayenne pepper blended with orange juice. I’ve no idea if it worked, but my urine turned clear and I always got standing space on the tube.

We stuck rigidly to the diet until disaster struck: an upgrade on the flight to Bangkok. Our willpower collapsed and over the next “lost” 12 hours we demolished peanuts, smoked salmon and oyster mushrooms, roast goose, cheese, port, champagne, Baileys and chocolates.

We had four more days before the fast, but while I got back on track, the photographer went totally off the detox rails. He consumed beer, Pringles, coffee and, as we waited for the Koh Samui connection at the airport, slipped in two Burger King chicken sandwiches, a huge pile of fried onion rings, a large Coke, followed by a chicken dinner on the plane. He was clearly heading for a remarkable first enema.

By the eve of the cleanse, I’d already lost over 2kg, weighing in at 86kg. Anthony was a little heavier, at 91kg. After demolishing an emotional last supper, we met our fellow fasters. They appeared a cosmopolitan crowd, confounding fears of being stranded among the sandals and lentil brigade.

There was Derek James, an engineer from Leeds, and Margaret Barrett, a sales rep from Cambridge, both in their mid-20s and aiming to clean up their acts after “caning it” while working in clubs in Tokyo. Nicky McCulloch, a 27-year-old Australian teacher, hoped to sort out a range of allergies, including wheat and alcohol. She was travelling with Mez Hay, a worm farmer with a shock of blond hair and strident ocker accent. Passionate about Italian food, along with steak, chops and sausages from her parents’ farm, Mez admitted she was keeping her friend company and hadn’t put in a single second’s preparation. “I didn’t know about it,” she snapped. “Who the hell are you, the bloody fast police?”

Others also had tangible goals, including tackling stomach complaints, severe constipation and mystery lumps. Most were keen to stress – a cynic might say too keen – that losing weight was not the goal. “It’s a bit extreme to travel half way round the world just for a diet,” argued Mez. “You’d be a bit superficial. Mind you, I wouldn’t mind shedding a few pounds.”

That didn’t promise to be a problem. After checking our pH levels – too low and the fast isn’t advisable – we immediately learned that while we wouldn’t be eating, a great deal would still pass our lips. The relaxed, stress-free week on the beach would involve a Stalinist adherence to a pill-popping timetable. Each day started with a charming 7am detox cocktail of psyllium husk and bentonite clay. It had the texture of liquid cotton wool, but would be crucial for pushing toxins and garbage through my system.

Ninety minutes later, we had to swallow eight tablets. They looked like rabbit droppings, tasted like rabbit droppings but were, in fact, a mix of chompers (herbal laxatives and cleansers to attack the accumulated gunge in our colons) and herbal nutrients to help compensate for those missed during starvation. We had to repeat these two doses every three hours, every day, with a final handful of pills at 8.30 each night. There was just one more lesson, the small matter of the self-administered enema. Our teacher was the sickeningly lean, tanned resident alternative health expert, Chris Gaya, who appeared to have stepped straight out of a Californian aerobic video. He made the colonic irrigation equipment – bucket, piece of wood, plastic tube, bulldog clip and nozzle – sound like straightforward DIY, although it’s unlikely to feature on Blue Peter in the near future.

All we had to do, he informed us, was to lie on the wooden board between a stool (stop giggling at the back) and the toilet basin. There’s a hole at one end of the board over the loo; above it a nozzle connects to a tube, which in turn leads to a five-gallon bucket of liquid hanging from the ceiling. We would liberally coat the nozzle, which was the width of a Biro ink tube, with KY jelly, lie back, think of profiteroles with chocolate sauce, and slide on.

Controlling the flow of liquid with a bulldog clip, we were to let it flow until we felt full, before massaging it round the colon (roughly following three sides of a square around the lower belly) and releasing. Fluid would, apparently, be flowing in and out of our backside at the same time. “We’ll be on the board for around 40 minutes,” cooed Chris. “So let’s make ourselves as relaxed as possible. Put on some soft music, light a candle, create a romantic atmosphere.”

We clearly took different approaches to seduction. But mastering the enema, once I’d got over muscle-clenching nervousness, really wasn’t difficult. I somehow ended up with my right foot half way up the wall, but five gallons went in and out without major trauma. By that night I’d shed another kilo, and although light-headed after 24 hours without food, felt strangely satisfied with the mix of supplements and detox drinks.

Next morning, my first enema of the day down the pan, I sat in the restaurant staring longingly at the menu, and found inspiration in the shape of two women nibbling their post-fast fruit. They exuded some of the rudest health I’d ever seen.

Carol Beauclerk, a “global nomad” with a mop of curly black hair, was a vegetarian, practised yoga, meditated and warmed up for her fast with a 17-day hike in Nepal. At 54, she had the energy and enthusiasm of someone half her age. “This place is really jumping,” she enthused. “I’m now hoping to do a week-long fast each year.”

Two tables away, scribbling in a diary, was Claire Lyons, a 32-year-old British journalist who had recently completed 21 days without eating. Having not gone near a set of scales, she had no idea how much weight she’d lost, but told me, “I feel great. Once I got past day 10, over the hump, it was surprisingly easy.” Claire oozed serenity, but three weeks without food is unlikely to leave anyone hyperactive.

By mid-afternoon, their shining example was all but forgotten. I was feeling awful. Tired, lethargic, simply lousy. Having not eaten for 36 hours my body was apparently going into detox mode. Margaret, who had felt nauseous since waking, had actually thrown up, and was questioning her motivation. Nicky, meanwhile, had produced “something about nine inches long, it was very dark, very scary”.

Things were no better for Mez. Already ravenous, she was spending an inordinate amount of time sniffing around plates of steaming Thai curry in the restaurant. She had also failed to grasp the basics of colonic irrigation. Instead of letting the liquid flow out, she had taken a massive amount in – until she was about to burst – before struggling to sit on the toilet and release it. “I had a huge stomach,” she gasped. “I was thinking, this must be wrong. If anyone can take the whole bucket in one go, they’re sensational.” I made a mental note to watch out for spectacular explosions from chalet six.

It wasn’t all bad news, however. I discovered we were allowed the luxury of a daily bowl of vegetable broth. It made me pathetically happy, savouring every drop as if it were a Gordon Ramsay creation. Filling perhaps, but it did little to halt the weight loss, and by the end of day two, a further two kilos had vanished.

By next morning, tiredness had been added to my hunger. I seemed to have been up half the night on the loo, the result of drinking a copious amount of fluid. My bodily functions had also taken a turn for the truly bizarre. I experienced flu-like symptoms as I started to expel 36 years’ worth of toxins with headaches and aching muscles; my nose ran constantly, my eyes were sore and weepy, my ears waxy. I felt like something out of The Omen. I had also plucked up the nerve to put a colander down the toilet. Close examination showed I had passed several feet of long brown string that shimmered as if subtly illuminated by a photographer’s light.

And I wasn’t alone. Margaret had picked through her colander with chopsticks to reveal yellow fatty chunks, Mez had filled hers to the brim with brown stringy “chicken skin” mucus (“We’re talking litres”), as had Derek, whose output included a strip about eight inches long, while Anthony described his as “patchy, like rabbit droppings”. Similar surreal conversations with virtual strangers became the norm, achieving levels of intimacy beyond the range of couples who have been together for years. Perhaps avoiding frank discussion of bowel movements is one secret of a long-lasting relationship. That night, as I escaped the dense tropical warmth, and flicked through books on diet and nutrition in The Spa’s library, I discovered a remarkable document: The Healthview Newsletter. Inside, octogenarian bowel specialist, V E Irons, attempted the Herculean task of selling colonic irrigation on its erotic potential. I would lose my frigidity, he promised, my sex life would go stratospheric.

“How could anyone fully enjoy sex when he has up to 15 years of encrusted fecal matter and mucus in his colon?” asked Irons. “HE CAN’T – and HE WON’T. If you want to remain sexually potent for your entire life, start cleaning your colon today. I’m 87, and I still enjoy sex. And if I can at my age, I know you can at your age… so get on with it!” It was of little consolation to Mez, whose hunger had now assumed epic proportions. She was considering eating her apricot moisturiser, she told me.

That night produced the most vivid dreams of my life, a typical symptom of detox, with blockages disappearing from the mind as well as the body: I’d attacked Vietcong gun positions in a hot air balloon, I’d played golf with exploding balls, I’d been savaged by a grizzly bear. Other guests’ dreams were more grounded in reality: Anthony and Mez had raided their parents’ fridges, with the worm farmer devouring steak, potatoes and cheese sauce. And some simply begged for the psychiatrist’s couch. Nicky, who in reality sees her divorced father only sporadically, dreamed he had turned into her boyfriend. Freud would have enjoyed that. Indeed, in private conversations with guests, well away from my notebook, many fasters admitted to having recently split up, or having travelled to Koh Samui to get a long-distance perspective on relationships. I had unwittingly stumbled on Relate-On-Sea. There was further physical fall-out, too. Day four was supposedly the worst of the week, with toxins expelled through the skin and lungs, as well as the kidney and colon. I didn’t disappoint. My nose, ears and eyes deteriorated, my sinuses throbbed, I was yet more sluggish. It felt like a beer, wine and whisky hangover. Increasingly strange things appeared in our colanders. Derek was shocked to find rubbery nuggets, Mez had found black oval shapes “up to five inches long”, my offering had an almost luminous green tint.

As if to celebrate crossing the halfway point of the week, many of us switched enema solutions. Abandoning coffee and vinegar, I flamboyantly opted for garlic, claimed to get rid of parasites. It seemed as natural as ordering gin and tonic instead of margarita, but when I casually told my girlfriend in a telephone call to London, there was a long silence. “Are you aware how tenuous your grip is on reality?” she asked. “Are you with a cult?”

I clearly needed to get out more. Many people hadn’t left The Spa for days, it was developing its own micro-culture. But when I summoned up the energy to sip mineral water in a bar in nearby Lamai town, I felt instant paranoia. The lights, the noise, the crowds, the smell of food. It was a world in which I didn’t belong.

I returned to the womb to find new guests. John Twigg, a burly 37-year-old Kiwi, had prepared by drinking more wine. “It’s made of grapes,” he argued. “Grapes are vegetables, so what’s the problem?” He was joined by the Lycra-clad Mimi and Dave Hatherley from Fairbanks, Alaska, who had an unnerving habit of finishing each other’s sentences. Forty-two-year-old Mimi ran, biked and did step classes five times a week; Dave, 43, ran, skied, hiked, climbed and mountain biked. They were both “into vitamins and nutrition” and while fasting were also exercising hard because “the results will be better”. After talking to them, I felt strangely giddy.

My mood and physical condition, however, were about to go through a dramatic change. By lunch – sorry, by the second dose of herbal laxatives – on day five, my nose, eyes and ears had cleared, and I had more energy. Remarkably, without nibbling a single shred of food for 120 hours, the irrigation still washed out huge amounts of gunk. I passed six-inch strips of gristle and what appeared to be large chunks of fillet steak. I don’t know how I ever afforded them, let alone swallowed them.

At least I could contribute to the increasingly competitive enema discussions. Someone had always passed something harder, brighter, more bizarre. Margaret’s chopsticks had unearthed some gristle, about a foot long, and hard, black pellets. She was so impressed she took a photograph. A few chalets away, Mez had passed “rubbery brown, fat worms” with a strange purple glaze, which she insisted on showing to me in her bathroom. But the clear winner was Anthony’s 22-year-old marble. Perhaps the most bizarre thing, which I didn’t appreciate until days later, is that it all seemed perfectly normal at the time.

When I next bumped into Alaska Dave, he was jogging rapidly between the restaurant and his chalet. As panpipe music played in the background and he told me about today’s three-mile hike, I noticed he wore a strange electrical device. It was a zapper that emitted an electrical current to kill parasites, and carried the printed warning: “For research only. Not approved for use on humans.” Even for The Spa, that clearly wasn’t normal. The improvement continued into day six. A nearly detoxified brain and bloodstream meant I awoke clear-headed, and full of energy. The enemas now produced less, but it was darker and harder as the fast broke away the older, more ingrained plaque.

It was the same story the next day. Our bodies seemed to reflect a mood of demob happiness. I had rarely felt so healthy, so energised, in my adult life. That didn’t, however, mean the end of the bizarre revelations. John passed “something from an alien movie” into his colander – and then videoed it for his office colleagues. He was joined by an outsized oil worker, Pipeline Pete, embarking on his 10th fast. “The first time I came,” he boasted, “they needed to dig three cesspits.”

And there were more. Early that evening, I found Mez huddled over a well-thumbed tome in the library. “Jesus, have you read some of these?” she groaned, handing me a book of ex-guests’ awed testaments. “I’d have bet £1,000 my bowels were clean,” wrote Chris Markvert, 67, “seldom have I been so surprised.” “Great pooing,” said Roy from San Francisco, “the best month of my young life.” And RTM contributed seven pages of increasingly manic scrawl, which included interesting facts about the Vikings.

It also contained graphic photographs of people’s enemas, footnotes in The Spa’s history to go alongside stories of legendary guests, such as the alcoholic whose detox included hiding whisky bottles and wandering naked into neighbouring resorts; and “Kathmandu Joan”, who fasted for 140 days over two and a half years, passing over 70 green and black “buttons” and clearing up an abdominal disorder.

We couldn’t compete with that, but by the morning of day eight, the fast was being credited with impressive results. It had, people claimed, got rid of allergies; removed worrying lumps that had necessitated appointments with gynaecologists; eased severe period pains and sinus problems; helped people lose kilograms while improving their skin and strengthening their nails. I’d lost well over 6kg, had an indecent amount of energy and, as people kept observing, had developed unnaturally bright eyes. I wasn’t aware they were cloudy before, but felt I had earned some flattery after 14 enemas and no food for roughly 170 hours, 35 minutes and four seconds. The cost of the seven-day programme, by the way, is £184, and accommodation in a chalet for the week adds another £60 or so.

The first post-fast meal of papaya made my toes curl with pleasure, but, as George Bernard Shaw observed, “Any fool can fast, but it takes a wise man to break a fast properly.” Raw fruit and vegetables should be the order of the next three days, but within hours Anthony had consumed two Snickers bars and a fish supper. It appeared to have no ill effects. They came 24 hours later. After demolishing piles of local prawns, we unwisely sipped a shot of Mekong whisky. Toxins tasted good, very good indeed. So good in fact, that by midnight, we had drunk a bottle each. The next morning, on the beach, my glasses were smashed, toxins pulsing around my bloodstream, the hangover indescribable.

But the week was not wasted. As a nutritional Philistine, I was inspired to read more, to learn some basic lessons. It’s hardly double-blind scientific research, but I defy anyone to examine a post-irrigation colander with its chunks of apparently undigested family roast and not make some small changes to their diet. I love meat; the smell, the taste, the texture, but now it only makes a rare appearance on my plate.

Frankly, even that’s too much for the gurus of cleansing, who believe a truly health diet revolves around fruit, vegetables, nuts and pulses – the more that’s raw or steamed the better. Along with fish, they’ve become the staples of my diet. If I occasionally lapse – and nothing will make me give up Christmas turkey or goose – a flashback to The Spa reins me in.

While I’ll take caffeine, alcohol and chocolate to the grave, I’ve also cut back on most dairy and wheat products. It might make me the dining companion from hell, but I do, at least, have the stories. People are constantly appalled yet fascinated by the idea of cleansing, and for some masochistic reason, demand the grim details between starter and main course. As they wait for their medium rare fillet or pork Dijonnaise, they crane forward to hear more about the decaying contents of people’s colons.

As for Anthony, he never considered giving up meat. Or cream sauces. Certainly not Snickers. Life, as he sees it, is too short. And who am I to argue? But remember, this is the man who has lost his marble.

Ray Le Maistre Editor/Online producer Total Telecom – www.totaltele.com ray.lemaistre [at] total.emap [dot] com Fixed Tel: +44 (0)20 7505 8630 Mobile Tel: +44 (0)7718 966448

Alternative e-mail: ray_le_maistre [at] hotmail [dot] com

Total Telecom: The home of global communications

—–Original Message—– From: Ian Andrew Bell [mailto:hello [at] ianbell [dot] com] Sent: Friday, March 22, 2002 3:28 PM To: Ray Le Maistre Subject: Re: What would you do without your phone or e-mail?

On 3/22/02 1:40 AM, “Ray Le Maistre” wrote:

>
> It’s not a new idea, and has probably been written about before. Countless
> times during the past 25 years I have read newspaper articles about
families

…

Ray, this article ROCKS! Entirely the type of stuff I love for people to find. Next time, can you please paste the text as well as the URL so that it gets archived on FOIB?

Keep ’em coming!

-Ian.

** For great Emap magazine subscription & gift offers visit http://www.emapmagazines.co.uk **

Wednesday January 23 2:35 PM ET

Inexpensive Satellite Does the Job

By TOM STUCKEY, Associated Press Writer

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) – Once every 100 minutes, a bargain basement satellite loops around the earth, sending and receiving digital messages over antennae made from a metal tape measure.

A sailor on a solo crossing of the Atlantic bounces signals off the satellite to stay in touch with his family. New Zealanders on a cross-country hike use it to communicate with friends back home.

Any ham radio user with the proper digital packet-transmitting equipment who is within 2,000 miles of the 25-pound satellite can use it to send single-line text messages to a public channel.

After four months in space, the U.S. Naval Academy’s “bird” is proving surprisingly resilient, to the delight of the midshipmen and faculty advisers who designed and built it.

The so-called Prototype Communications Satellite (PCSat) was the 44th amateur satellite put in orbit. It is one of more than a dozen built by university students around the world.

At a cost of just $50,000 – including plane tickets to the Alaska launch site – it was constructed using off-the-shelf parts not designed to withstand the rigors of space. Its life span was only expected to be a few months.

Six students put together the satellite last year after a three-year research and design project made possible with a grant from Boeing Co. The Department of Defense Space Test Program approved the project and put it on a launch list.

A tape measure from Home Depot provided the antenna. Power comes from two dozen AA batteries that are recharged by the solar panels, which are in sunlight an average of 75 minutes per orbit.

Midshipmen designed circuit boards, ordering them from an Internet supplier. Parts rated for use in space, which are built to withstand the effects of radiation from the sun, would have been too expensive, so the students went with regular circuit boards.

Sept. 29 was Launch Day, and there were anxious moments at the academy as the cube-shaped satellite hitched a ride aboard an Athena rocket that blasted into space from Kodiak, Alaska.

Save for the failure of one of the six solar panels, damaged when the satellite separated from the rocket, there have been no problems.

On Launch Day, it was nine hours before PCSat made its first pass over Annapolis and the midshipmen and faculty advisers could see for themselves that their satellite was working.

“I was thrilled. It was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life,” said Steven Lawrence, who helped build the satellite before he graduated in May.

In the following weeks, people in remote areas began to use the satellite as word about it spread through an international organization of ham radio operators.

Just how long PCSat works depends on how much solar radiation bombards the satellite and how long the batteries, solar panels and thousands of transistors withstand the sun’s damaging effects.

“If we get lucky with radiation, it could last three years,” said Darrell Boden, a professor in the aerospace engineering department.

–

On the Net:

http://www.ew.usna.edu/pcsat

Or maybe the split that I was advocating is just plain common sense.

Being a socialist, I took it further by nationalizing the local loop / wholesale side of the business. But within reasonable confines this guy has the right frickin’ idea.

-Ian.

——–

http://www.telecomcareers.net/Resources/News/shows,etc/S1364.htm

Legislative Update: A new bill aims to split the Bells

Industry nosedive aside, telecom is–and has long been–a house divided. To foil a fall, most now agree, the Telecom Act of 1996 must be amended. But how? Therein lies the discord. It’s the scrappy CLECs vs. the mighty RBOCS vs. anti-Bell AT&T–to simplify the schism(s). But on Capitol Hill, where (officially) the battle is being waged, the matter has become increasingly complex. We’ve seen aisle-crossing-with co-sponsored bills-and now, House-hopping as focus shifts to the Senate. 

Earlier this month, the new chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-SC) entered the fray armed with S-1364, a bill that would split the Bells into separate wholesale and retail companies. They call it structural separation. Its aim? To prevent the Bells from hindering competition through control of the local loop. That control would instead be given to independent spin-off companies that would lease lines not only to the Bell retail units but also to competitive carriers. 

As the local dominant carriers, the Bells would have to put their wholesale and retail operations in separate divisions within a year of S-1364’s enactment. If, within another year, they violate competitive provisions of the ’96 Act, the FCC could force them to fully separate the operations into separate subsidiaries.

CompTel, the Competitive Telecommunications Association, is supporting the measure. 

“CompTel has long maintained that separating the Bells into wholesale and retail units is the only way to ensure that Bells give up their local phone monopolies,” said CompTel president H. Russell Frisby, Jr. in a recent press release. “Given the Bells’ refusal to honor their legal commitments to open their local networks as codified in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, there really is no other choice.” 

The Hollings bill would also give the FCC more power to fine dominant local phone companies when they fail to open their networks to rivals. The bill extends the statute of limitations for a violation from one year to five years. 

“Given the lack of competition in the local markets, the intransigent behavior of the Bell companies, and concerns about poor service quality, we are left with no choice but to adopt measures that will ensure Bell compliance with the 1996 Act,” Hollings said in a statement. 

He and the bill’s co-sponsors, Sens. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), have built-in opposition to S-1364 in the sponsors and supporters of HR-1542, a piece of telecom legislation introduced earlier this year. 

Sponsored by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.) and Ranking Member Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich), HR-1542 proposes to ease regulations in the ’96 Act, allowing the Baby Bells to enter long-distance data markets without opening portions of their local network to competitive use. The Tauzin-Dingell bill passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee but was voted down by the House Judiciary Committee. That action did not kill the bill, however; it merely “recommended” against its passage. 

In-House opposition to HR-1542 came when Reps. Chris Cannon, R-Utah, and John Conyers, D-Mich. introduced alternative legislation, HR-1697/1698, to counter what they call “the anti-competitive practices” supported by HR 1542. In short, the Cannon-Conyers bills aim to discourage those practices and uphold the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The bills would prevent RBOCs who hold more than 85 percent of the market from offering long-distance data services. The legislation would also allow competitors to resolve interconnection disputes before one arbitration board instead of state by state, and it would create a $3 billion loan program to assist companies in rural broadband deployment.

And so the legislative battle rages on, underscored by a fierce lobbying battle that’s become one of the most recognizable features on the telecom landscape. You might say that the Hollings bill simply adds a new twist to an old plot. 

But with HR-1542, HR-1697/1698 and S-1364 on the table, The Net Economy’s Paul Coe Clark III says there may be more to it than that: 

“What we are seeing in Congress now in the realm of telecom is something very different. Two completely different philosophies toward the public network are hurtling toward each other at ruinous speeds, each supported by apocalyptic rhetoric, massive lobbying and considerable political clout. Something’s gonna explode.”