Simply unbelievable

As Susie says, you can’t make this stuff up. From the NYT:

The Energy Department will begin laying off researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the next week or two because of cuts to its budget.
A veteran researcher said the staff had been told that the cuts would be concentrated among researchers in wind and biomass, which includes ethanol. Those are two of the technologies that Mr. Bush cited on Tuesday night as holding the promise to replace part of the nation’s oil imports.

Bush's law-breaking: an update

There have been a couple of interesting developments in the Bush/FISA story. First, a group of lawyers have comprehensively demolished the attempt by the Department of Justice to provide a legal justification for Bush’s actions. Money quote:

The argument that conduct undertaken by the Commander in Chief that has some relevance to “engaging the enemy” is immune from congressional regulation finds no support in, and is directly contradicted by, both case law and historical precedent. Every time the Supreme Court has confronted a statute limiting the Commander-in-Chief’s authority, it has upheld the statute. No precedent holds that the President, when acting as Commander in Chief, is free to disregard an Act of Congress, much less a criminal statute enacted by Congress, that was designed specifically to restrain the President as such.

Second, Doug Thompson at Capitol Hill Blue has identified a fairly impressive list of Bush appointees who told Bush that his actions were “breaking the law” and “could doom your administration”. They include:

  • Colin Powell, ex-Secretary of State
  • James D. Comey, ex-Deputy Attorney General
  • John Ashcroft, ex-Attorney General
  • George Tenet, ex-Director of the CIA

Of course all are now “ex”….

First blog entry from 34,000 ft

If you know me, you’ll know that I’m a sucker for cool new technology. (However I do have some blind spots: I still haven’t got a TiVo. Perhaps I really do believe in network services, in which case TiVo is a short-term fad and a technological dead-end. We’ll see. More prosaically, I donb’t watch much TV.)
Anyway, Lufthansa now offers internet access from their long-haul aircraft, and so I decided to buy an hour of access for $9.95. Latency is quite acceptable, the sign-up process (using Boeing’s Connexion by Boeing) is very straightforward.
Right now we’re at 34,000 feet (FL340 if you prefer), just crossing the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and heading towards Iceland and Greenland. We left quite late – once again, a couple of passengers didn’t board, so we had to offload their baggage; then we had to de-ice which took longer than I expected. However with light headwinds we are told that we should arrive on time,
Reading material on the flight is Kate Fox’s “Watching the English”, a wonderful bit of rigorous sociology/anthropology disguised as a book “for the intelligent layman”. As an expat Englishman, it’s fascinating to explore where some of my weirder* behaviours come from – but also how much of my “Englishness” I’ve lost! For example, I now tend to tip the bar staff in a pub, which is terribly gauche. (Hell, I miss my local pub. I’d love to be a “regular” somewhere other than Starbucks.)
—
* By American standards, anyway, but then most Americans don’t understand the English.

Deja vu… vu… vu…

After a delayed flight from Prague (baggage loading, de-icing, then dense fog at Frankfurt) I’m back at the FRA Red Carpet Club for the third time on this trip. How did that movie “Groundhog Day” go again…? Anyway the next leg to DEN is the longest: about 11 hours, I think. I’m going to wander over to the gate and try to switch to a window seat on the right side of the plane: I want to get a good view of Greenland, and it’s easier if the sun isn’t in your eyes.
UPDATED: Well, actually it wasn’t the longest leg in flying time. FRA-DEN was just 9 hours 20 minutes; BLR-FRA took just over 10 hours. Several factors: FRA-DEN was close to a great circle, and headwinds were light. For BLR-FRA, we took an odd northerly route, rather than the direct path over Pakistan and Iran. And FRA-DEN was on a 747-400, which cruises quite a bit faster than the A340-300.

Curses, Blazed again

You may have noticed that my post about Czech cheese and wine just got truncated. What happened was that I decided to edit it slightly from the Blazer web browser on my Treo 650. It turns out that this browser has a limit on the size of a text field that it can handle, and rather than warning the user it silently truncates the data. This is clearly unacceptable, and if anyone from Palm is reading this….!
(Is there a better browser available for the Treo?)

One last post from Prague

A little more food p0rn….
This evening I decided to dine once again at the CD Club in the Diplomat Hotel. The waiter had a little trouble with my accent, and to accompany the “roast knee of lamb” he brought me a bottle of wine rather than a glass. Oh well… I decided not to send it back. It was a local non-vintage: a Frankovka red (labelled “modry sklep”, whatever that means). Very tasty. When the lamb arrived, it turned out to be what in America is called “braised lamb shank”, albeit a little drier than usual. Pleasant, but not distinguished. I finished it, and still had all this wine. What was I to do? The cheese plate beckoned.
An interlude: back in the 1990s I used to visit Grenoble regularly – perhaps 3 times a year – and I always stayed in the Park Hotel. They had a tiny restaurant that was notable for two things:

  1. If you ordered a half bottle of wine (and they stocked some interesting vintages in half bottles), they would give you “the other half” as a gift when you left
  2. they had the most extraordinary cheese board

Frequently I caught myself hurrying through dinner because I was impatient to inspect the cheeses!
Back to CD Club. The cheese plate arrived, and there were four extremely fine cheeses, none of which I could identify. There were two large wedges of a blue, some segments from a small chevre, a…
I grabbed a passing waiter (the same one that had mistaken my wine order) and asked him if he could identify the cheeses. He muttered something blasphemous like “Edam” and scurried off.
But wait: my favourite maitre d’ was suddenly to hand. I thrust a pen and paper towards him and asked him to write down the names of the cheeeses. He was delighted to oblige. The chevre style was Hermelin, the blue was Niva, the strong (?goat’s-milk) one with an orange rind was Tvarusek, and the semi-soft wedge was Blatackeslato (which is “very difficult for you to write” as he explained).
And with wonderf
UPDATED: For your enjoyment:
Cheese plate

An unspeakable choice: rape, or death from dehydration

From Suburban Guerrilla

Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women’s latrine after dark.

Just to be clear, we’re talking about women in the US Army choosing to risk death to avoid being assaulted or raped by their brothers-in-arms. Somehow I missed this aspect of the Army’s guiding ethos.

Wrapping up in Prague

I’m just wrapping up here at the Sun Prague office, after a full day of meetings. Most of them were on technical or business topics, but Roumen (or Roman) scheduled a session with a number of the bloggers here in Prague. (I didn’t get everyone’s name: please leave a comment if you were there, and I’ll add you to my blogroll.)
In a few minutes I’ll don sweatshirt and jacket (it’s warmed up a bit, but it’s still -4C), walk down the hill to my hotel, have dinner, pack, and hit the sack. I’m booked on a 6:50 AM LH A320 to Frankfurt tomorrow, connecting with an LH 747-400 to Denver. If all goes well, I’ll be arriving there at 3:25 PM. And the temperature is forecast to be 12C, which will make a nice change. I hope I can sleep on the flight, since I’ve got a dinner engagement in Louisville tomorrow evening!
And thanks to all who took the time to meet with me here in Prague. (And also to those I met in Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Pune.) I’m looking forward to our next face-to-face discussions, hopefully in the summer.

Free speech in Britain

Here’s a stirring piece by Polly Toynbee in the Guardian about today’s Commons’ debate on the Religious Hatred bill. Money quote:

Free speech is fragile: laws change cultural climates in the media and inside minds. Police who can, absurdly, question Sir Iqbal Sacranie for his homophobic views yet never arrest him for his inflammatory remarks over Salman Rushdie, will make no sense of this law. Police stations will be besieged by insulted zealots brandishing ancient books. Only the attorney general can agree an actual prosecution. Refusing will add offence to the already offended.

It’s an absurd bill, a bad bill, a deeply illiberal bill. Hopefully MPs will boot it out.
Update: The MPs did the right thing by endorsing the Lords’ amendments – and curiously, when the time came for the decisive vote, Tony Blair was nowhere to be found!!