Barack Obama

So, to no-one's surprise Mr Obama announced Feb 10th that he is running for President. Given that the likely Republican candidates are Rudy Guiliani, John McCain and, for heaven's sake, Newt Gingrich it really does look like the next Democratic choice for President may well be the leader of the "Land of the Free" from 2008. Hilary may have substantially more old-school moneyt backing her but Barack seems to have something that no dandidate I've seen for a while has - popular charm - and has it in buckets. Here's a guy who worked for years in community groups in Chicago and then gained scholarships to go back to univertiy and ended up editing Harvard Law Review - compare that to the privileged lives of most of the recent presidents.

An essay on his history, a page with a "mom and apple pie" style video history, an attempt to get 1,000,000 members of FaceBook (american student-only social networking site) to register they will vote for him, Barack's own very nice looking campaign and social networking site. This is either a guy who really understands what the 'net can do - or has people working for him that do.

Anyway - a female (if rather unpleasent and very old-shcool) candidate vs a non-white candidate who spent a number of years in Indonesia with a muslim step father. Interesting times.

Of course any resemblance to this character is pure co-incidental (man, those writers were always good).

Start them off young

I read recently that Dundee University has been teaching very simple philosophy (critical thinkinh basically) to local primary school children.

This reminded me a lot of Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit.

The sooner more critical thinking is taught to more people at a younger all the better off everyone will be.

Bits and pieces

Currently watching Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society - seeing Kusanagi, Batou and the tachikomas the is like coming back to old friends. :-)

Josh Wolf becomes the American "journalist" who has spent the longest in jail for not turning in sources to a story. Mr Wolf is a freelance blogger and many quesiton whether those count as professional journalists (regardless of people like the folks who runn Kos frequently getting press passes).

Very interesting article on the mass sell-off of British companies and institutions (eg football teams) to foreign companies and individuals. While the article is very informative in-and-of-itself the real question is of course - does it really matter?

$12bn shipped to Iraq goes missing. Yes, literally 30+ tonnes of money vanished - much of it then used to buy weapons used to attack American soldiers.

The bizare religous ruling council of Saudi Arabia is very unhappy with the letter "X" (appearently it looks to much like the Christian cross) and many of their other strange statement.