Current Affairs

With Prince Charles visiting us here in The Colonies, perhaps its time for a roundup of news about the Mother Country:

You can take away Aussies' public smoking, but don't touch their alcohol:

The National Drug and Alcohol Research Council study of 1,500 Australians found that some 58 percent of people agreed that sometimes having too much to drink was "simply part of the Australian way of life."

If I want to go somewhere to celebrate drinking, better there than Russia.

Prince Charles, bless his heart, thinks we are too dependent on technology:

"If you make everything over efficient, you suck out, it seems to me, every last drop of what, up to now, has been known as culture," Charles said in the interview, which was recorded last month in Poundbury, England.

"We are not the technology. It should be our ... slave, the technology. But it's rapidly becoming our master in many areas, I think," he said.

Michael Moore edited someone's particpation in "Farenheit 9/11" in an unfair way to make it come out the way he wanted??!? I'm shocked -- shocked and outraged, I tell you. Never would have believed it.

It's no big surprise that as soon as American war deaths in Iraq reached 2,000, a whole lot of people would be using that magic number to advance their own causes. It would be too depressing to list all of them. Here's one that's representative of the rest: Stastically speaking, at least 25 of the dead probably were gay.

I don't especially like "the trolley is going off the tracks and the people who should care don't" pieces, but Peggy Noonan says it so eloquently. Noonan's lament isn't quite the same as Jimmy Carter's famous malaise speech (in which he didn't use that actual word); he blamed the American people in general. Noonan zeroes in on a more specific group:

You know the Rosa Parks story. Now, here's the rest of the story:

Those who see government as the solution to social problems may be surprised to learn that it was government which created this problem. Many, if not most, municipal transit systems were privately owned in the 19th century and the private owners of these systems had no incentive to segregate the races.

The Onion, is, you know, a humor publication. If stuff like this keeps happening, some might suspect that people in the White House have no sense of humor:

There is so much room on the Web for people with such specific interests, like this site that is about nothing but pencils. And these folks demand to be taken seriously:

First, no, this site was not created as a joke, and many hours a week and money do not go into it as a joke. If some folks do not like pencils and prefer pens or computers, they are perfectly free not to be a part of our community.

If a city pays a newspaper $100,000 to print only good news about it, that's both bad journalism and an outrageous use of tax money.