I realize that this will probably be of no interest to anyone else, but I found it mildly amusing.

Someone was claiming that the “teabaggers” were going back to the founding principles of the United States. This is probably an attempt to tie what they are doing to what the tea smugglers and small business people in Boston did in the harbor.

As I pointed out earlier, the “teabaggers” are on the side of the Crown when it comes to taxes, because the Boston Tea Party was a protest against a tax cut for the East India Company, which allowed them to sell tea at “low prices everyday”.

The other thing was their fixation with teabags. The teabag was invented rather by accident by a tea merchant during the first decade of the 20^th century, when he shipped people samples of his wares in little silk bags. The paper teabag wasn’t actually introduced until the mid-1940s. A concept that is barely a century old hardly qualifies as going back to the founding of the nation.

They could call themselves the “tea strainers”, as tea infusers, like the tea ball, were just being introduced at the end of the 18^th century, and were unlikely to have been very common in the Colonies. There is a lot to recommend “strainers”, as they are certainly straining to display they have any relevance in the current political climate. Strainers is certainly easier to spell than infusers, and, in the interest of saving keyboards and screens, they really should stay away from the tea ball.

They might consider an alliance with the Anarchists, as that is the only movement with whom they have any common ground. The underlying problem is that to be a successful movement you really have to be for something. It is certainly apparent that they aren’t for reading American history, or much of anything else.

I keep bringing up the fact that more and more companies are in trouble because they are more influenced by the stock market than the market their company sells in. The real problem is that there are no investors left on Wall Street, they have been replaced by gamblers who are only concerned with their personal profits, and not the long-term, viability of the companies whose stock is being traded.

Colin Barr at Fortune writes about some of those gamblers in Who cares if Wall Street ‘talent’ leaves? These guys failed and almost took the world down with them, so who loses if they leave? There are plenty of people looking for work who didn’t lose billions of dollars.

Numerian at the Agonist continues this line of reasoning with Cupidity and Stupidity Run Rampant on Wall Street. These guys are only interested in helping themselves, not in fixing the mess they created, or in helping the economy rebuild. The sooner they’re gone the better. There are a lot of people in this country who believe they should be behind bars, not receiving megabuck salaries and bonuses.

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Only übergeeks actually understand and care about this news from the Seoul ICANN conference, Internet Set to Allow Non-Latin Addresses, but this is the culmination of years of hard work by people like EBW at Wampum.

They are set to allow people whose language is not written in the Latin alphabet [actually limited to the 7-bit version of ASCII] access web sites without having to shift to the ASCII character set, i.e. the Russian sites can use .ру instead of .ru [the Cyrillic version may look like py, but the underlying codes of the characters are totally different and may appear as two question marks for some of you.] This is especially important for Asian users, as most of them do not use the Latin alphabet.

Internet addressing is about to become international.