Forget the DaVinci Code

AlterNet: A Game As Old As Empire

If you want to read a great conspiracy story, you can't go past this one and it's true.

The link is to an interview with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and it talks about his time with Chas. T. Main, a Boston based international consulting firm that worked with (persuaded) countries to take on infrastructure development loans which were given on the proviso that American firms provide the construction services.

Most of the recipients of these loans have fallen into a situation where they cannot repay these loans and have been forced into submission by aid agencies and other organisatons like the World Bank. Now here's the scary part, this is not a by product of well meaning investors, it was the original intention.

Read the article and let other people know. You'll only read it in the independant media.

iPodiots!

It used to look cool I suppose, people with white ear phones plugged in and the white cord leading from the ears down into a pocket or bag containing the mystical iPod.

I work in a University and on my travels around campus I find I can't look in any direction without finding one of these people walking around. My friend refers to them as iPodiots, I think it describes them well. The iPod isn't the best player out there, it might be the coolest, but who really needs to be walking around with 10,000 songs in their pocket?

What I want to know is the when is saturation point reached? Surely Mac can't keep the cool factor going on something that has become ubiquitous.

I love my little iRiver MP3 player. It only holds about 70 songs, but it wasn't that long ago I had to take out a tape and turn it over after 5 songs and the headphones are a nice dark blue. To the casual observer, I could be listening to anything, even a portable gramophone!

I did a Google search for iPodiot and got no results. Could this be the first recorded instance of a new word? Don't you mourn the days when people talked of more important things?