The incredible hulk

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Fire devastates Cutty Sark
Fire today ravaged the Cutty Sark, turning the 19th century tea clipper, permanently moored in south London and one of Britain's most important maritime treasures, into a blackened wreck.
The Cutty Sark is the most famous tea clipper built, and is the only one to survive. She was launched at Dumbarton on the River Clyde, Scotland, in 1869. The name comes from Robert Burns' poem, Tam O'Shanter; Tam meets a group of witches, most of whom are ugly, but for Nannie, who is young and beautiful and is described as wearing only a "cutty sark", i.e., a short chemise or shirt. The ship's figurehead is a representation of this witch.

The Cutty Sark's sleek lines and enormous area of sail made her the fastest ship in the race via the Cape of Good Hope for the then particularly money-spinning tea trade with China. Unluckily for her owners, the Suez Canal, which is not navigable by sailing ships, was opened in the same year as her launch. Her last cargo of tea was carried in 1877.

In 1922 she underwent a refit in the Surrey Docks, London, and was driven to shelter from a storm in Falmouth harbour on her way home. A Captain Wilfred Dowman saw her there, and bought her from the Portuguese owners, returning her to British ownership again. On Capt. Dowman's death in 1938, his widow presented her to the Thames Nautical Training College at Greenhithe on the Thames, where she was used as a training vessel.

After the Second World war she was towed to Greenwich and placed in a specially constructed dry dock in 1954. After a lot of restoration work she was opened to the public in 1957. Since then more than thirteen million people have visited her.
I notice that efforts to put out the fire were delayed by forty five minutes while local residents were evacuated because a gas cylinder was spotted near the scene. The ship was undergoing a £25 million renovation but it doesn't seem that much of the money was spent on security or fire precaution.




Poncey Steyn

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James Wolcott
I saw Mark Steyn on Fox News the other day and he seems to have acquired a poncey accent to go with the neater trim of his beard. Perhaps they can be purchased in a deluxe package deal at the finer barbering establishments. What remained unchanged was his breezy air of knowledgability that is standard equipment for a confidence man peddling glib opinions.

As Self-Styled Siren demonstrates, Steyn knows as little about Hollywood as he does about how buoyantly things are going in Iraq, which doesn't trouble his fans, who know and care even less. They're happy to clap like seals as he sets out to score ideological points based upon false premises and carefree errors, punning and funning merrily away.



Support the troops

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White House: 3.5 percent pay hike unnecessary - Army Times

Troops don’t need bigger pay raises, White House budget officials said Wednesday in a statement of administration policy laying out objections to the House version of the 2008 defense authorization bill. The Bush administration had asked for a 3 percent military raise for Jan. 1, 2008, enough to match last year’s average pay increase in the private sector.

The House Armed Services Committee recommends a 3.5 percent pay increase for 2008, and increases in 2009 through 2012 that also are 0.5 percentage point greater than private-sector pay raises. The slightly bigger military raises are intended to reduce the gap between military and civilian pay that stands at about 3.9 percent today. Under the bill, HR 1585, the pay gap would be reduced to 1.4 percent after the Jan. 1, 2012, pay increase.

Bush budget officials said the administration “strongly opposes” both the 3.5 percent raise for 2008 and the follow-on increases, calling extra pay increases “unnecessary.”




Who knew?

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I didn't bother to watch the Panorama 'exposé' of Scientology. What's to expose? Weird ideas? Manipulation? Brainwashing? Welcome to the world of religion. At least they don't stone female members to death for sexual misdemeanours, hang homosexuals, snip off babies' foreskins, beat themselves with chains in public, protest at the funerals of soldiers or condemn self-abusers to an eternity of damnation.

spiked | Stop the press: Scientologists are creepy!
The basic argument of the programme was that the Church of Scientology is not a proper religion. ‘I can’t imagine the Church of England behaving like this’, Sweeney said when Tommy was giving him a hard time.

And suddenly Tommy’s point about the American constitution looked rather important. If your model of ‘proper religion’ is an established church, and one noted for its worldly respectability at that, then that doesn’t leave much room for religious freedom. Just about all religions have been described as cults at one time or another, and indeed a more thoughtful definition of a ‘proper religion’ might be one that insists on its own morality rather than submitting to the judgement of the secular world.


While we're on the subject. The latest Betty Bowers newsletter arrived earlier today. Here's a sample:
The type of Christians Jerry (Falwell) spoke to were rich people looking to get richer -- or poor people stupid enough to give what little they had to make those rich people's selfish dreams come true.

While Jesus commanded that we help the poor, Jerry was a man less preoccupied with poor helpings than second helpings.

Frankly, Jerry was always more devout when it came to the GOP than the GOD.

And, as a virulently anti-catholic ex-catholic, my favourite:





Spreading democracy you say?

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Greg Palast, Author of Armed Madhouse, on How Rove May Have Already Stolen the 2008 Election
Greg Palast:
In 2006 and 2004, they (Tim Griffin**, under the direction of Karl Rove) challenged tens of thousands of black soldiers. They stopped their votes from being counted when they were mailed in from Baghdad. Go to Baghdad and lose your vote -- mission accomplished.

BuzzFlash:
How did they do that?

Greg Palast:
By sending letters to the homes of soldiers, marked "do not forward." When they came back undelivered, they said: Aha! Illegal voter registered from a false address. And when their ballot came in from Fallujah, it was challenged. The soldier didn’t know it. Their vote was lost. Over half a million votes were challenged and lost by the Republicans -- absentee ballots.

Three million voters who went to the polls found themselves challenged by the Republicans. This was not a small operation. It was a multi-million dollar, wholesale theft operation.

(** Now U.S. Attorney for Arkansas)


Palestinian Pinochet

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Rootless Cosmopolitan -  Mohammed Dahlan - Making His Move?
There’s something a little misleading in the media reports that routinely describe the fighting in Gaza as pitting Hamas against Fatah forces or security personnel “loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas.” That characterization suggests somehow that this catastrophic civil war that has killed more than 25 Palestinians since Sunday is a showdown between Abbas and the Hamas leadership — which simply isn’t true, although such a showdown would certainly conform to the desires of those running the White House Middle East policy.

The Fatah gunmen who are reported to have initiated the breakdown of the Palestinian unity government and provoked the latest fighting may profess fealty to President Abbas, but it’s not from him that they get their orders. The leader to whom they answer is Mohammed Dahlan, the Gaza warlord who has long been Washington’s anointed favorite to play the role of a Palestinian Pinochet. And while Dahlan is formally subordinate to Abbas, whom he supposedly serves as National Security Adviser, nobody believes that Dahlan answers to Abbas — in fact, it was suggested at the time that Abbas appointed Dahlan only under pressure from Washington, which was irked by the Palestinian Authority president’s decision to join a unity government with Hamas.




Mass medication

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Fortify 'bread with folic acid'



Men, boys, old women, young women who do not intend getting pregnant, pre-pubescent girls - all will have to eat bread fortified with folic acid in order to prevent around 350 cases of neural tube defects (spina bifida) a year.

The possible benefits of folic acid in preventing spina bifida were first raised 35 years ago yet I'm sure that the vast majority of women of child-bearing age are still completely unaware of its importance. So what's the answer? Education, advice on dietary supplementation? Encouragement of women to take responsibility for their health and the health of their developing child? No.

Stick it in the bread dear. That'll do nicely.


(S)haha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, !

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Wolfowitz to quit the World Bank

Paul Wolfowitz is to quit as head of the World Bank after a bitter promotion row involving his partner. The global lending body said Mr Wolfowitz would step down on 30 June and that it would begin the search for a successor immediately.
Now, what was it John Bolton was saying 16 hours ago?
John Humphreys: We're seeing the demise of Paul Wolfowitz, President of the World Bank.
 
John Bolton: I see you're a gravedigger as well. I'm not at all sure I see the demise happening yet.