"The number of territory markers predicted road rage better than vehicle value, condition or any of the things that we normally associate with aggressive driving," say Szlemko. What's more, only the number of bumper stickers, and not their content, predicted road rage -- so "Jesus saves" may be just as worrying to fellow drivers as "Don't mess with Texas".

Szlemko admits that he is not entirely surprised by the results. "We have to remember that humans are animals too," he says. "It's unrealistic to believe that we should not be territorial."

Precious little research has previously attempted to explore drivers' territorial feelings about their cars, says psychologist Graham Fraine at Queensland University's Transport Policy Office in Australia. "This work clearly demonstrates that people will actively defend a space or territory that they feel attached to and have personalized with markers," Fraine says.

Szlemko suggests that this territoriality may encourage road rage because drivers are simultaneously in a private space (their car) and a public one (the road). "We think they are forgetting that the public road is not theirs, and are exhibiting territorial behaviour that normally would only be acceptable in personal space," he says.

TUC on science select committee report response

Commenting on the Government's response to the report of the House of Commons Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee into Science Budget Allocations, published today (Tuesday), TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said:

"DIUS has refused to acknowledge the deep funding problems in UK science, highlighted by the Select Committee. Hundreds of jobs could be lost and cutting edge physics programmes could disappear because of funding shortfalls.

"DIUS is in danger of losing the confidence of the science community, as well as that of trade unionists working in laboratories. Planned cuts in science budgets should be put on hold until the Wakeham Review has reported in September. If Wakeham finds that the cuts would significantly damage UK physics, then they should be reversed."

Science in the UK is underfunded enough as it is. it shows a lack on interest and understanding of the importance of science, research and development to keep cutting the budgets here.

Ad astra per aspera

Not so Tony Blair, former prime minister of Great Britain and beloved cowboy sidekick. From the first indiscreet moment on the public stage, when Bush revealed that he and Tony shared the same brand of toothpaste, Blair purged himself so completely of pride, shame, pique, and preying doubt that each rhetorical flourish he voiced in support of the freedom mission in Iraq rippled like a flag, his mouth supplying the wind. If only the nougaty goodness of his eloquence hadn't been so undermined by his eager, ears-pricked anxiousness to please whenever the White House whistled, Blair might have been able to salvage enough respect to avoid the lapdog label. But the poor man was starstruck, lovestruck, dumbstruck, some kind of struck. Preserved for YouTube posterity is the cringe-making footage from the July 2006 G-8 summit captured on live mike during a lunch break, when Bush hailed, "Yo, Blair!" (there is some minor dispute as to whether it was "Yo" or "Yeah" Bush uttered--the title of Geoffrey Wheatcroft's book Yo, Blair! indicates which interpretive camp has prevailed), and, talking while chewing like Henry VIII with a chicken leg, proceeded to air his remedy to resolve the then ongoing conflict between Hezbollah and Israel that was tearing apart Lebanon: "You see, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over." The great ones make it sound so easy.

.........................

That is the abiding mystery of Blair's constant flutter, how little he got for his toadying, the zero dividends his standing-tall, shoulder-to-shoulder stance earned. As the British journalist Andrew Brown wrote for Salon, "No British prime minister except Thatcher and Winston Churchill can have been so much admired in America . ............................................. For his unrequited loyalty to Bush, Blair was dealt one indignity after another until his valiant smile resembled a sword turned inward and his prime-ministerial reign dribbled to an anticlimactic close.

Hope all are well with all of you, check in again late next week when I get back.

Steve

"I said, 'Wait a minute, Chester, You know I'm a peaceful man...'" Robbie Robertson

Will a book about to be published by historians Slawomir Cenckiewicz and Piotr Gontarczyk - "Secret services and Lech Walesa.  A Contribution to the Biography" shed some new light on the past of the legendary Solidarity leader? 

 

The publication is said to aim to answer the question if the former Polish democratic opposition leader, Nobel Peace Prize winner and President Lech Walesa co-operated with the Communist Secret Services (SB) under the nickname "Bolek" and informed on his colleagues from the Gdansk Shipyard in 1970s, reports the Radio Information Agency (IAR).

Rzeczpospolita broadsheet presents the main theses of the publication.  The newspaper reveals that the documents studied by historians from the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) - the publisher of the book - include Walesa's personal details form drawn up by SB when the Solidarity leader was arrested during the Martial Law in Poland.  The document says that SB enrolled Lech Walesa as a collaborator on December 29, 1970.   

 

"In the period between 1970 and 1972, he revealed a lot of information regarding harmful activities of shipyard workers", says the document, as reported by Rzeczpospolita.  

As to the question of whether the historians' analysis is sound and unbiased, I leave that to Marek. At any rate, if true, I think

1. this doesn't take away from Wałęsa's deeds in Solidarność,
   
2. nor does this add to Wałęsa's general misdeeds as President,
   
3. it is interesting, however, how his personal situation might have affected the secretr files mess, version Poland.

 

The daily also quotes a note drawn up by a secret services officer in 1978, which says that Walesa received money for the information disclosed to the SB.  The book also accuses Lech Walesa that in 1992 and 1993, when he was President, he demanded the Ministry of the Interior to grant him access to his personal files gathered by SB.  Some fragments of his files were never returned back to the Ministry, the authors of the book claim. 

The article goes on to detail turmoil in the Institute of National Remembrance (its head was against the publication), and the real possibility that these are forgeries of the outgoing regime:

Also the former Head of the Agency for State Protection (UOP), General Gromoslaw Czempinski denied on TVN24 that Lech Walesa could operate as agent Bolek.  He said, "Bolek might have been a fictitious figure". Former UOP head also told the television he knew that forgery of documents against the opposition, perhaps including Walesa, was common practice among the Communist secret services in Poland. 

Interpret that as you like :-)

I told Bush; don't play chess with the freakin' Russians.

My wife had been invited to go see the game tonight with some half-Italian friends, and had booked the baby-sitter. So when my trip was changed, I was hoping to go with her.

But now the baby-sitter is ill, and we have two additional kids for the night at home - well, I have 2 additional kids, given that my wife is still going to her party....

It should be fun - the only question is whether I'll succeed in putting them to sleep before the second half. And it needs to be actual sleep, given that I have no TV and need to go over to the neighbors to watch the game...

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

The creation an efficient, effective and fair U.S. climate policy is utterly important, and overdue. But, argues Dynamic Cities Project founder Bryn Davidson, unless we take Peak Oil into consideration, we may end up in a situation that pits energy security against climate change concerns.

Davidson told the 30 or so people squeezed into a board room at the Seattle Office of Sustainability & Environment that only by coupling policy on Peak Oil and climate change, will we succeed in reaching a sustainable future. (Take a look at what Peak Oil looks like here.)

Although climate change is the larger threat, Davidson said, the magnitude of Peak Oil will soon outweigh climate change concerns, as fossil fuels are ingrained in almost our entire infrastructure.

"Peak Oil is an economic bulldozer that comes on and changes everything," Davidson said. "A climate strategy that ignores Peak Oil would be like sticking our heads in the sand."

Our current infrastructure planning processes come out rather stupid in comparison.

Also, how do people feel about "schmoozing"?  I'm decidedly anti-"schmoozing."  

OTOH, it's a backyard bbq at my friend's house.  I can't not go.  That would be silly.  I've just been so out of the US politics/blogosphere drama loop lately...  

"This is nothing compared to how Putin rigged Eurovision."

Thoughts?

Where's your motherf*%&ing flag pin?