>We recently got back from our honeymoon to Samui Island and really wish that we didn’t have to leave as we really enjoyed it and will definitely come once more! We stayed at The Bungalow Mountain Resort which I would certainly recommend. We rented a scooterat $70 for 9 days, it was by far the cheapest and a convienent way to go and it was alot of fun too! The zoo is definitely worth while taking a tour. Also restaurantson Koh Samui to visit are The Sweet n Spicy-romantic, delish and cool. Book a table with your feet in the pool!

The UK has a ‘good, free, health care system’?

Gracious Tom, I’ve lived here all my life and I hadn’t noticed. It is, infact, VASTLY expensive, hopelessly inefficient (estimated level of funding fraud £3bn ($4.5bn) p/a) and not especially good. Several thousand people die per annum as a result of infections caught while in State (NHS) hospitals (MRSA mostly) – by comparison, I gather the number who suffer the same fate in private hospitals is, er, zero, – while waiting lists still plague the service despite Government claims that the problem is in decline. A couple of years back the Government, having kept the true scale of MRSA deaths under wraps, decided to broadcast the fact that they were ‘on the case’. The idea – hospitals would actually be kept clean by means of employing more sanitary staff!!!! You couldn’t make it up. Rationing is the latest big thing over here. If you are fat or smoke or are old, look out, you’ll be refused treatment as there’s not enough to go around – even if you have paid the compulsory ‘NI’ subs for your entire working life. To add insult to injury, patients are routinely treated like cattle from the GP doctors surgery through to hospital appointments and recovery, where to be seen ‘on time’ is regarded as near enough a miracle. If this is good, god help us all.

I confess that I have not seen ‘Sicko’, as Michael Moore’s reputation as a hopelessly bias political ‘spin doctor’ distorting whatever is necessary to further his State Socialist aims goes before him. I wouldn’t give him the time of day. If ‘Sicko’ is anything like his previous offerings (which I have seen) then it’s almost certainly a fairy tale and a ’tissue of whoppers (lies)!!.

Just a final thought, if the reality of the NHS as described above, really can be defined as ‘good’ in comparison to the system in the U.S., you really are in big, big trouble!!

Best wishes.

The flaw in that reasoning is that technology is now in reversal, and is driving us toward de-centralization rather than centralization. The internet and communications technologies are combining to empower individuals against the state, and we are finding creative ways of financing our own needs.

What the Western powers have not recognized in our present “war on terror” is that individuals around the world are able to employ the latest communication technologies to build “cells” that coordinate activities and become intense learning centers.

I predicted to local readers that when the “surge” began in Iraq, opposition leaders would simply wait and observe troop movement or deployment, study strategies, and use that when the surge was lifted.

Actually, the opposition leaders studied strategies and employed them in Afghanistan where it was assumed that the rebellion was largely in control. Terrorists are not confined to limited geographical wars or even limited objectives. They can uise their learned strategies against us at any point on the map, at virtually any time.

These are strategies that contribute to de-centralization strategies as our own military must find ways to develop de-centralized command decisions and speed up reaction time.

Information and communication technologies contribute to an intensification and acceleration of a learning process that bypasses centralized control of command centers.

It cannot help but produce a “feedback” in our own government situation(U.S.) as the Vietnam war created feedback as people watched the war in their living rooms. Even as the nation-state seeks more control, it contributes to its own breakdown by using increased credit and debt to finance a war that can be fought by the opposition “on the cheap”.