Are there really 27 separate national interests? Or maybe 4 (Protestant Europe, Catholic Europe, ex Communist countries, and the English speaking countries)? I've a theory that national identity is mostly negatively defined by "who you are not." Muslims are not westerners, but they've been defined as being Islamic (by westerners), so witness the Islamic "flowering." We see today. What that means in terms of values is what counters everything the west is accused of being.

Just a thought.

If I'm not mistaken, the EU really hasn't experienced this kind of bloc formation (though from what I'm reading, it exists). So the lack of drama and interest might be a blessing.

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As for the bandwidth issue, it might be a database issue as well. My installation relies on a MySQL database, which was free as well. As far as I know, only Oracle and PostGre are databases which pass the ACID test, and can handle large amounts of data and transactions. PostGre is free, but requires a Unix/Linux server. I've taken to writing my posts in a text file and dropping it into WordPress to preview. But I had screen issues which required this. Works fine for me, I have no plans to experiment with anymore blog apps.

"It Can't Be Just About Us"
--Frank Schnittger, ETian Extraordinaire