disucssion is fine..just no

Ahhhh, Mawww! The Beav started it!

The wizard. The question is who is the wizard?

Iraq (aka Iy-raq) - at least Bush was honest in his motives for "exporting democracy to Iy-raq", he wanted regime change and sod the UN and the dubious legitimacy. In the UK we were fed a load of BS about Saddam's WOMD and how his missiles were 45 minutes strike time from London. We were doing it for an honourable motive of self defense, (not like the nasty Texan), turns out all Saddam had were a few caravan trailers. Then the guys who produced the "45 minute intelligence" start hanging themselves, you couldn't write it for TV and not get it laughed at as unbelievable.

Gas - 63 % of what we pay for our gas goes directly as tax, our gas is running at the equivalent of $ 9 per US gallon. The initiative for hybrid cars (petrol and battery) seems to be driven by Japan (Toyota Prius and Honda) and Germany, Dubya is an oil man so no lead from that corner I guess.

PD - Rasagaline, the patch, two most recent high profile PD launches and two "me toos" of the PD world. Shoot low and miss seems to be the motto. As for the UK stem cell initiative, usual two blokes in a shed in Cambridge / Oxford / Newcastle, waiting for funding which my bloody gas tax could have provided three times over were we not funding a war in Iy-raq.

Still on the bright side, depending on the rigour of your definition of benign and comparatively speaking, the US is the first benign superpower in history, (despite Dubya's best efforts). The wheels have recently dropped off the US scientific research wagon, the stem cell hysteria showed evidence of that, but the fundamentals are still in place.

Things can only get better, (theres a song in there somewhere).

Take care,
Neil.