At Atheist Air, prior to boarding, passengers would be required to spout blasphemous remarks at a display of artifacts from all the major religions. This effectively weeds out anyone who has a secret plan to meet the Creator in the next few hours. Blasphemers would be allowed to carry-on pickaxes, blowtorches, chainsaws, nun chucks, whatever, under the theory that atheists generally try to avoid hurting other people in any situation where there isn't a clear escape route. --Scott Adams, Dilbert Newsletter 49.0

Denmark appears resistant to, or perhaps just in the early stages of infection with, the SUV. And completely immune to Starbucks. Blockbuster is everywhere, but aside from the ugly yellow and blue their stores aren't so hideous when confined to kiosks instead of mounted within parking lots (really, what isn't better when stripped of its parking-lot moat?). 7-11 is everywhere but they adapt so much to local conditions that I have a hard time calling them a plague.

One very nice thing is that the public clocks work. I've seen dozens of clocks, and all but two showed the correct time. The downside, though, is that some of these clocks are attached to church bells, and those work just as well. My new room is a block away from a big ole' church. The bells were charming when they rang 8 pm. Less charming when they rang in 11 pm. Even less so at midnight. Six am I didn't appreciate. But they don't ring every hour, which I guess is good - certainly it's quieter - but confuses. Sometimes there's a single bell at half past. Last Thursday there were one hundred and twenty nine rings at a bit past seven. Saturday morning, one hundred and thirty-something rings at a time I can only define as "early morning." I've been told that Danish counting is base-twenty, but that seems insufficient explanation for the perfidy of the bell-ringers.

(Let's take a moment to applaud the Chinese counting system, shall we? Base ten and completely simple. Four is four. Ten is ten. Forty is "four ten." Forty-four is "four ten four." There aren't even teens. It's brilliantly simple.)

I'm getting used to the bicycle lanes, which are both a blessing and a curse. You have a dedicated lane on most streets, but when you turn you have to remember to watch out for real bicycle traffic as well as cars and pedestrians. Making a left turn can take an extra light cycle as you coast to the far corner, pivot awkwardly, and wait.

I went to the US embassy early last week to get more pages in my passport. A year of Chinese efficiency had used up almost all the pages in a new passport. (Adam Katz, I still have one of your visas in my passport. I hope you got that straightened out.) The American embassy in Copenhagen is really really ugly - a squat fortress with office-building-like glass stylings, and lots of concrete barriers and construction debris. And beefy Danish security guards. Where are the Marines? I got this nice patriotic surge looking at the flag and then there weren't Marines. What the hell do I pay double-taxes for if not for sharply-dressed Marines at the embassy? And then the extent of the first security check was, "where are you going?" "I'm going to my embassy." "oh, American. Go ahead." So if you want to rush the embassy, just practice one or two phrases until your accent is eliminated.

The second security check was five feet later, and I had to surrender my laptop, my Palm Pilot, and my keys, and go through a metal detector, just to get into the passport services office. Turns out I can't go anywhere but the little service room, which has mostly unhappy-looking Danes and tennis magazines. The library is long-closed, and the very pretty gardens didn't look open. I filled out a form, handed over my passport, and read tennis magazines for half an hour until I got my passport back, twenty blank pages fatter. Happily, this service is free, so I highly recommend it as morning entertainment to any Americans abroad, particularly those homesick for American hospitality, Newark-style.

Last weekend Peter's friend Bogdan, a Pole living in Philadelphia, came to visit on the way home for vacation, so we went to Sweden for the day. Peter eagerly pointed out how much better everything was in Sweden, but really it seemed about the same. The bathroom at the restaurant where we had lunch does deserve special mention, though. The weather was amazingly pretty so we were all sitting at outdoor tables on the main square in Malmo, and I headed into the empty retaurant to take care of business. I saw a waist-high cement pillar labeled "W.C." at the center of a descending spiral staircase. You go down the stairs and you're in this beautiful, ultra-post-modern frosted-glass fantasy of a basement bathroom. The door to the mens' room is a sheet of glass blocks six feet wide, permanently anchored to the floor at a forty-five degree angle to the opening. I was very impressed and hoped that perhaps Sweden was secretly a nation of palatial bathrooms, but sadly the other accomodations I saw that day were not of that caliber.

It turns out the Sweden and Denmark are more or less the same. The Danes were a tribe out of Sweden, and once they conquered Zealand and Jutland they started their own country, with the same language as Sweden, and naturally there was nothing for the two nations to do but go to war with each other over and over for hundreds of years. The church we visited in Lund (north of Malmo, but not as far north as Helsingborg, which is across the water from Helsinore in Denmark) was famous for the Bishop, who was actually Danish, because at the time that chunk of Sweden was conquered, and the Bishop is famous for discovering the Danish flag, alleged to be the first national flag in the world. It's red with a white cross, and it fell from the sky and landed on or near the Bishop, and that's how we all came to have flags.

The consequences of my failure to maintain, even for two hours, my oath to foreswear pastries in Denmark has surprisingly not had disastrous consequences, perhaps because the omnipresent pastry shops (look for the pretzel shape on a sign) all offer the same selection, and I can only eat so many chocolate croissants. Real decadence is much more expensive and not offered at every corner. In fact, if you take price into account, I was much happier with the dining options in Guilin. There's Danish food (not much for vegetarians after the potatoes), shawarma (middle-eastern - pretty good because you can get falafel in pita), pizza, and McDonald's. I tried an Indian restaurant tonight and it was fine if not inspiring, and US$20. The Thai food has been disappointing, and it's really hard to get tofu unless you cook it yourself. The fancy department store supermarket had jars of tofu at US$5 for half a block. Um. Come on, guys, it's just tofu. But their dark chocolate truffle, at US$1 each, was so good that I ate one and was made happy and content, both extremely rare states for me.

In my travels, I'm not learning languages so much as learning how to fake languages while communicating. On the way back from Frederick County Town Hall, where I registered for my id number and health insurance (I had to pick a doctor at random - I looked for the least Danish name on the theory that immigrant doctors have more to prove), I tried to pop in to a little place for some Thai food. They had lunch boxes for US$5. "No meat," I asked the extremely jaded, very Thai-looking woman of uncertain age and function by the door, who might well have been from the porno business next door except that she seemed to want to take my (lunch) order. She launched into a description of the different lunch choices, which seemed superfluous both because they had pictures and because her language of choice was indeterminate. When I thought I heard "chicken," I interrupted. "No gai." She stopped, puzzled. "Tofu?" This got me directions, mostly in English, to a different Thai restaurant. "Ahh. Sawa-di-kap" (hello/goodbye) and I steepled my hands in front of my face and bowed in traditional Thai style as I left, which got me a grin and a punch on the shoulder.

Denmark is expensive! The basic plan for Danes seems to be that your standard of living for a given month is your income (less forty-five percent), and that you don't bother to save because taxes are high and social security is plentiful. This seems like an exaggeration/over-simplification - taxes aren't that terribly high, for one, but all the same I don't expect to save much money here unless the dollar really crashes. Which I'm hoping for - I get paid in Kroner.

The office is in an five-floor brick 1859 trading house on Havnegade, which means harbor street. So the water is directly across the street, and there are some public tie-ups. The whole time I've been here, there's been a medium-sized sailboat with a Swedish flag tied up in front of our building. We saw the owner once or twice - he looks like a stereotypical mad Swedish sailor - lanky, middle-aged, a deep weathered tan, a bunch of curly hair, and little round glasses. Once he was drinking tea, and once he was doing boat stuff, and Simon says he saw him yelling at tourists. We're afraid of him. We want to know why he's been parked in Denmark for three weeks. Other boats have come and gone and he's still there.

The history of US foreign interventions in the last century is filled with stories in which the US first tried to build liberal institutions in this or that country, saw it was going to be either really tough or unsustainable, and then settled for dictators or autocrats who were thought could secure our interests for the time being.
-- Josh Marshall

(Cynical as this is, it still doesn't address the argument that even the liberal interventions were still motivated by private financial interests.)

Riding a strange bicycle, my frustration led me to enumerate all the things I like about my own bicycle. It fits - the frame height and shape, the seat height, and the crank length altogether are pretty close to correct. It has a bunch of gears, and even in a flat country that's useful for accelerating without brutalizing your knees. You can shift gears while pedalling - that's nice. It has a rack and pair of panniers, so I can carry a lot of stuff without wearing a backpack or shoulder back. It has clipless pedals (a wonderful misnomer for pedals that clip to metal cleats in one's shoes, because they work like the pedals with the big basket clips that normal shoes fit it) so my feet never slip off the pedals, and I can put a bit of power in the upstroke. It has a real front headlight and red light in the rear that can blink at two rates, though you shouldn't set it blinking because that's illegal. It has brazeons with cages that hold water bottles. It has a bicycle computer which, despite (INCOMPLETE - get link) certain usability issues, often shows time and velocity. It has narrow, high pressure tires so that I don't spend energy flexing the rubber. I can spin the pedals backwards freely, which lets me line up the pedals for a good stomp when the light changes. I have a comfortable, stylish helmet. My bicycle is the thing I miss third.

Peter, the Swede, reports that Swedish women are taller, blonder, and more .... "More Swedish?" I ask. "Yes."

In the duffel bag that I chose to leave in Seattle, after lugging it up and down the West coast from Anchorage to San Diego, was my external hard drive with all my music, as well as my nice, bulky Sony headphones. Regretting the decision, but having left the duffel on an island, I picked up some used CDs in Seattle just before I headed for the airport. The new Peter Gabriel needs a dozen more listens before I reach any conclusions; early Loreena McKennitt sounded like a mistake on the first track and I haven't gone back; a Springsteen tribute album with Dar Williams, Los Lobos, and Johnny Cash is something for the library, not traveling music; The Magnetic Fields is a group that's constantly cited in the local alternative newspapers and The Onion as the sort of band that I should feel stupid and mainstream and ignorant for not having heard. I picked up 69 Love Songs part 2. Aside from the one delightful track I sampled at random at the store, the rest seems deliberately stilted and unmusical. So I guess I wasn't missing much. Later: Okay, after listening a few times I appreciate it a lot more. It holds a tremendous amount of musicality and quite a bit of wit. Not all of it actually sounds good, though. My music is the thing I miss second.

I left my nice Microsoft Natural Pro keyboard in Seattle. It includes a USB hub, has a good angle, and has the correct arrangement of keys (2 1/2-wide, single-high Enter key, 1 1/2-wide \| key just above, and a double-wide, single-high backspace key in the top right; plus the Ins/Del, Home/End, PgUp/PgDn cluster in the classic three-wide, two-high configuration. My only complaint is that it has a numeric keypad, which hardly anybody would notice if it were missing. But I chose to buy a used Thinkpad in part because of the keyboard, which has the full, correct complement of Ins/Del/etc, a full inverted T of arrow keys, and the correct Backspace/\|/Enter configuration. So my keyboard is not the thing I miss most of all.

The eraser-head pointing device isn't bad at all, though my index finger pad started to hurt after two full days of work. But I borrowed a mouse and it's fine. So I don't miss my mouse.

Drivers in Copenhagen are nearly as aggressive as LA drivers, but not as hostile. They honk, swerve, and then go about their business. I suspect the aggressiveness may come from the fact that people who don't particularly want to drive can realistically use public transportation, so the drivers are disproportionately twenty-to-fifty male jerks. But there's still not too traffic overall, and in particular there are very few SUVs. I don't miss SUVs or passive-aggressive Seattle drivers.

I've gotten lost repeatedly. This is in part because I didn't have a map for a few days, and more because, while the intersections are often at right angles, the blocks aren't necessarily square. So I get off-track by a few degrees here and there, and it adds up. In the core area, the distances are small enough that my dead reckoning usually puts me close enough to recognize my surroundings. In the suburbs, at night, and particularly after getting off at the wrong train station without realizing it, this can be a bigger problem. But the map helps (though it took a fair bit of shopping to find a decent, laminated, folding street map), and the city is small, and I'll figure it out, so I only miss street grids a little.

I've looked up an American ex-pat meeting, and though it's at a bar I guess I'll give it a try. Hopefully I'll find somebody with a baseball glove, but I left my own glove and ball in the notorious second duffel. So maybe it'll be frisbee. But eventually I'll get my glove out here. I miss my glove and ball, and Americans.

At lunch with co-workers Simon (Danish) and Peter (Swedish), I asked about regional jokes.

"Of course," Simon answers, "Jutlanders have jokes about Zealanders, and the other way too."
"What about Swedish jokes?" I ask.
"We have Swedish jokes, and they have Danish jokes."
"Do you know if Scandinavians feature in jokes from the rest of the world?"
"No."
"Well, I can't really think of Danish or Finnish or Norwegian jokes, but there are plenty of dumb Swede jokes."

Peter interrupts at this point to gloat at Simon. "At least we Swedes are known. They haven't heard of you."

Public transportation is fairly flawless - buses as nice and as frequent as Hong Kong, better labelled (or maybe it's just easier to read a Roman alphabet), and without the tv advertising. The trains are covered in grafitti, but also well labelled and timely. I don't miss American public transportation.

I bicycled part of the way to Elsinore Sunday. It was mostly sunny and the temperature was perfectly pleasant. I think the land across the water was Sweden. Peter says the train to Sweden takes half an hour and DKK90 ($15). Maybe I'll go to Sweden next Saturday. My landlady (I'm living in a rented room in a townhouse in Emdrup, part of the first ring of suburbs. It's about four miles from downtown, maybe five.

Last week I wandered into a Pakistani Independence Day rally at the main square. I had a semi-coherent conversation with a man who remembered it personally ("Of course! I ran down the street with the flag.") and later relocated to London with his family. He was a bit hard to understand despite forty years in England, though I suspect he might be hard to understand in any language. I don't miss incoherence - I have yet to meet a Dane who couldn't speak fluent English. I've got the accent down on the numbers and "thank you" well enough to fool shopkeepers into answering in Danish, which is pretty counter-productive of me because then I have to say "pardon" and they blink because that doesn't parse because they weren't expecting English, and it's a bit of a snafu before we get back on track in English. I guess I should learn some more words. In particular, I often see stored boasting, "Slutspurt." But I think I'd rather preserve the mystery of that particular word.

A little, toyish purple game console with a lunch pail handle on back, with cartoonish games about a cartoon Peter Pan-esque Link who saves a cartoon princess and a cartoon plumber who collects little bits of smiley-face sunshine to save the sad, sad smiley-face sunshineless town, might be a lot of fun. Only those of us who are very secure in our manhood will ever know.

In the midst of the media cauldron boiling over about Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, we find gems like this:

"Queer Eye" turns on its head common notions of who in our society is preserving traditional values. It says out loud what many hetero eyes have long observed: America's gay community has become one of the last defenders of conservative ideals.

Worth a read, if only to imagine the conniption the President would have over it.

Newt Gingrich continues to be contra-rational. In an article arguing for radical reform of the State Department, he says,

One can hardly overstate how poorly the United States communicates its message and values to the world: Large majorities in France, Germany, and South Korea opposed the U.S. perspective on Iraq - not to mention the 95 percent disapproval rate in Turkey."

Apparently Gingrich cannot conceive that the United States may well have communicated its message and values, and that the French, German, Korean, and Turkish people may simply have disagreed. The article contain other lines that suggest Gingrich cannot imagine legitimate disagreement:

The values- and fact-based advocates note immediately that Libya is a dictatorship with a history of terrorism, and they thus conclude that Libya cannot chair the commission with any moral standing or credibility. By contrast, the accommodation worldview contends that Libya won the vote in the United Nations and that contesting Libya's moral and legitimate claim to the chair would be impolite and a violation of proper process.

I don't know about "moral" and "impolite," but it seems to me that contesting Libya's legitimate claim to the chair without technical grounds, of which I've heard none, would indeed be a violation of proper process. I see parallels between this attitude and the idea that the US should invent "unlawful combatants" or reserve the right to use cluster bombs, land mines, and other such weapons - see, we're the good guys. You can trust us.

But everybody thinks they're the good guys. Serbians slaughtering Croats thought they were defending their beseiged nation. Chinese nationalists threatening Taiwan and occupying think they're liberators (sound familiar?). The point of due process and rule of law is that the system is more fair than the players and thus must be maintained even when somebody is acting disagreeably, as long as they are still within the rules. Or, what goes around comes around. This is a lesson that I don't see evident in Gingrich, Rumsfeld, or the others.

Giving Gingrich more rope:

In May 2001, when the United States was ambushed and voted off the U.N. Human Rights Commission for the first time since the commission's inception in 1947, those people who focus on facts, values, and outcomes were justifiably outraged. But the State Department, admitting it was surprised, did nothing. Such passivity emboldened France to launch a campaign seeking to defeat U.S. foreign policy objectives articulated by Bush.

So the State Department's failure to break the UN rules caused France to oppose US foreign policy. Okay, next ...

As the world's only superpower, largest economy, and most aggressive culture, the United States inevitably infringes on the attention and interests of other peoples and nations. A country this large and powerful must work every day to communicate what it is doing. The world does not have to love us, but it must be able to predict us.

Under this logic, we should presumably keep starting preemptive wars without justification, in order to act predictably? Anyway:

Key to transforming the State Department's culture is the adoption of the right vision - President Bush's vision. We can no longer accept a culture that props up dictators, coddles the corrupt, and ignores secret police forces.

I think this is called projection.

Moreover, the rise of a global anti-American network of activists and nations - including left-wing nongovernmental organizations, elite media, and most of the elite academics around the world (including in the United States - further increases the country's need for a comprehensive communication and information strategy.

That's right - US universities, Amnesty International, the New York Times - they're all anti-American. I'm sorry, Mr Gingrich, but preemptive war is not American. Indefinite detention without trial is not American.

And if you think Gingrich is out of government and not important any more, then you probably haven't heard of the Defense Policy Board or our good friend Richard Pearle. Gingrich sits on, Gingrich advises Rumsfeld, and Gingrich is trying to get appointed Secretary of State.

Gingrich, being very smart and observant in addition to his less positive attributes, also advocates:

"a Foreign Service that is at least 40 percent larger"

"Indeed, diplomats should receive a significant extra monthly payment for language proficiency."

"U.S. authorities must initiate an ongoing campaign so that everyone who has suffered from torture or repression at the hands of dictators can tell their stories and bear witness;"

All good ideas. Call me morbid, though, but if we broadcast a few worldwide cable channels of nothing but people bearing witness (c.f. Shoah (INCOMPLETE - add link)), I can't help but wonder about the ratings.

At the beginning of my China journal, sweltering in a turboprop on the runway, headed for Vancouver, I noted that I expected to continue sweating for months to come. And I did.

Coming to Denmark, I didn't count on sweating. It wasn't a surprise that New York in August was muggy, sure, but after that ... I don't think it's dipped below 75 in the two days I've been here, even at night. Quite a shock, though consistent with the heat wave that left us cooking in Seattle last week.

Actually, I didn't think I'd be travelling right now. Due to miscommunication, I sat on the work permit paperwork until the last minute, and jeopardized my rescheduled plane ticket. Since changing the ticket involved multiple FedEx expenditures and at least an hour on hold, I was waiting until the last minute. (Travel Tip: never buy a paper ticket from Travelocity. Electronic, sure, but not paper. And since Expedia is ex-Microsoft, and Orbitz pays to piss us off with their pop-ups, I'm not sure what's left for fare searches.) But my tardiness worked out well when, the Friday week before the ticket date, I got an email that my work permit was approved. I bustled to mail my passport to New York, got it back the next Tuesday, and was on my way.

Oh, and another reason to avoid Travelocity for multi-carrier international travel: they gave me a 10-hour layover in Newark. 7 am to 5 pm. Thanks, guys. After six weeks of travel around the West Coast, I got hard-nosed and trimmed a duffel bag from my inventory of backpack, two duffels, and laptop bag. Bye bye second wool sweater, music apparatus, Natural Keyboard Pro, mouse, boots. But this still left me with an uncomfortable load of luggage on a day that was muggy before it even woke up. The very helpful people at Newark Airport (motto: "That's Newark _International_ Airport to you, you schmuck") said I couldn't store stuff there, "not since nine eleven." The bus driver was very helpful: "Nowhere. Nowhere in the city. Not since nine eleven." He dropped me off at his last stop, a block from ground zero. I walked over to the big hole in the ground, watched some street vendors fight over turf at eight am ("You don't touch the cart!"), and turned into a hotel across the street. They took my backpack and duffel for the day for free. I love New York - it's Jersey I can't stand.

New York was gray and hot and muggy - not a nice combination. I walked around, took a subway up to Times Square, walked partway through the Park, called Talli at 10:30 am and woke him up, met him back downtown, by which time it had cleared up a bit but was still too hot, and went to Battery Park to look at the Statue of Liberty (didn't I read that a judge had moved her to Jersey? That used to be good news but I'm not standing up for New Jersey any more. Although the bus driver did a great job of abusing traffic to get me back to the airport even after I had been stupid and gotten an unwisely late bus. I was still at the security checkpoint when they started boarding).

Denmark. Denmark is nice. I got it around 7 am on not enough sleep, and followed instructions to get to the apartment I'd found on the internet. My hostess was waiting ("I'm still up myself, actually. I was dancing all night,") and I dumped my stuff, got a key, tried to take a shower in a curtainless tub, and headed out to see Copenhagen.

At 9:30 am on a Sunday morning, really nobody is around except tourists. It was brilliantly sunny, utterly cloudless except if you looked on the horizon towards Sweden, and very civilized and peaceful. Nothing but cobblestones and six-story, two-century-old townhouses, with church steeples for variety. Really much much nicer than the bits of Newark I saw from the bus. Assuming the weather stays the same year round, the only thing between Copenhagen and perfection is some mountains nearby. I guess I'll have to go to Stockholm next.

There really are a lot of Danes in Denmark, and they really look like stereotypical Scandinavians. If there are brunettes, they're in hiding. They're all pretty serious about their tans. Everybody I approached spoke flawless English, but I still experienced that feeling of helplessness that I had at first in China. In fact, I think I felt better in the last half of the China trip, when I had barely enough Chinese to survive, than I do now.

I wore the t-shirt, but only got one comment, from the guy who sold me a postcard. He liked the shirt and said the Arabic had caught his eye. I overloaded on the beautiful scenery (Danes, Denmark, and sunshine in equal proportion) and headed home to conk out by mid-afternoon, while my hostess went to the beach. I slept for most of the next fifteen hours before heading to work.

Monday I beat everybody to the office at 8:30 am. I had a full, productive day, the first time in two years I can say that about a day spent in an office. As usual I'm sure I'm being too bossy and not shutting up, but then they did want a project manager.

Moreover, the global capital markets have begun to recognize the unprecedented size of this emerging fiscal catastrophe. In truth, the current Executive Branch of the U.S. Government is radically different from any since the McKinley Administration 100 years ago.

The 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, George Akerlof, went even further last week in Germany when he told Der Spiegel, "This is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history...This is not normal government policy." In describing the impact of the Bush policies on America's future, Akerloff added, "What we have here is a form of looting."

...

In each case, the President seems to have been pursuing policies chosen in advance of the facts -- policies designed to benefit friends and supporters -- and has used tactics that deprived the American people of any opportunity to effectively subject his arguments to the kind of informed scrutiny that is essential in our system of checks and balances.

The administration has developed a highly effective propaganda machine to imbed in the public mind mythologies that grow out of the one central doctrine that all of the special interests agree on, which -- in its purest form -- is that government is very bad and should be done away with as much as possible -- except the parts of it that redirect money through big contracts to industries that have won their way into the inner circle.

...

Maybe one reason that false impressions have a played a bigger role than they should is that both Congress and the news media have been less vigilant and exacting than they should have been in the way they have tried to hold the Administration accountable.

...

And speaking of the Patriot Act, the president ought to reign in John Ashcroft and stop the gross abuses of civil rights that twice have been documented by his own Inspector General. And while he's at it, he needs to reign in Donald Rumsfeld and get rid of that DoD "Total Information Awareness" program that's right out of George Orwell's 1984.

The administration hastened from the beginning to persuade us that defending America against terror cannot be done without seriously abridging the protections of the Constitution for American citizens, up to and including an asserted right to place them in a form of limbo totally beyond the authority of our courts. And that view is both wrong and fundamentally un-American.

...

If the 21st century is to be well started, we need a national agenda that is worked out in concert with the people, a healing agenda that is built on a true national consensus. Millions of Americans got the impression that George W. Bush wanted to be a "healer, not a divider", a president devoted first and foremost to "honor and integrity." Yet far from uniting the people, the president's ideologically narrow agenda has seriously divided America. His most partisan supporters have launched a kind of 'civil cold war' against those with whom they disagree.

And as for honor and integrity, let me say this: we know what that was all about, but hear me well, not as a candidate for any office, but as an American citizen who loves my country:

For eight years, the Clinton-Gore Administration gave this nation honest budget numbers; an economic plan with integrity that rescued the nation from debt and stagnation; honest advocacy for the environment; real compassion for the poor; a strengthening of our military -- as recently proven -- and a foreign policy whose purposes were elevated, candidly presented and courageously pursued, in the face of scorched-earth tactics by the opposition. That is also a form of honor and integrity, and not every administration in recent memory has displayed it.

So I would say to those who have found the issue of honor and integrity so useful as a political tool, that the people are also looking for these virtues in the execution of public policy on their behalf, and will judge whether they are present or absent.

--Al Gore

So that raises the question: What is usury? Usury is something that's analogous to overcharging of any kind. I cite some Hadiths in which it's clear the Prophet was against any form of overcharging. For example, he talked about if a broker dealing with somebody from out of town were to misrepresent the buy and sell prices of the products he's dealing with, then that would be riba. Clearly, that kind of overcharging is not interest, but it is prohibited. So my argument is that overcharging of any kind is prohibited to Muslims. A Muslim has to engage in honest business practices.
--Imad A. Ahmad

Dockers recently came out with a new brand of pants, the Go Khakis, which promise to keep your legs stain-free using revolutionary nanotechnology.

We couldn't help thinking that Dockers might be using the word "nanotechnology" more for marketing muscle than for true scientific purposes, so we called its customer service line to ask a few pointed questions. Here's a slice of the conversation.

Dockers: How can I help you today?

Popular Science: I just bought a pair of the Go Khakis, and I noticed it says they use something called nanotechnology for stain resistance. Can you please explain how that works?

D: Umm, it's, uh, DuPont Teflon coating, and basically what we're asking you to do is not to use powdered detergent and press them after every fifth wash, and dry cleaning is an option also. And do not use fabric softener, because it can interfere with that stain-defending property.

PS: Great, but can you explain what makes this nanotechnology rather than just a coating? What is nanotechnology?

D: One moment please. Did you get the pleated or flat-front?

PS: Flat-front.

D: OK, one moment please. Because the one that says nanotechnology is the versatile pant that wicks moisture away from you.

PS: It says nanotechnology repels stains.

D: OK, one moment please. Can you give me a style number off that?

PS: Sorry, I don't have it with me. But it was a "stain defender," and I believe it said "Go Khaki."

D: And that was the flat-front one.

PS: I believe so.

D: OK, I believe it does say nanotechnology because it's the 60-cotton, 40-micropoly blend.

PS: So that's where the nanotechnology comes in?

D: Uh-huh.

PS: I still don't understand. Are there microscopic machines repelling the stain? How does it work?

D: Umm . . . I guess it's the type of fabric that makes it the nano.

PS: So the "nano" has more to do with the size of the fibers? And water is small enough to get through for washing, but other liquids are not—they bead up and roll off?

D: You know, I'm really not sure, but I do know they'll come clean. My kid has a pair of these. Messy kid. So I got the shirt and pants, and he's doing great with them. You just need to remember to press after every fifth wash.

PS: But would you say the stain defender was the Teflon coating or the size of the fibers?

D: It's a Teflon finish on the pants.

PS: So is nanotechnology affecting the stain resistance?

D: I would say not. I need to help other customers, ma'am. Can I ask how you got the number to call us today?

PS: 1-800-DOCKERS? Lucky guess.