“Read and learn”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/10/index.html#004459. The old “pig-fucker strategy”:http://www.methree.net/archives/December/grueterthompson1.html emerges for the last month of the campaign, with the added twist of getting the party operatives to plant fake evidence.

I’m plagued by an evil SpyWare problem at the moment, which neither SpyBot S&D nor AdAware detects. (Norton AV also says I’m virus free.) The problem is an occasional launch of an Internet Explorer window, linking to this site or that site. Perhaps installing XP SP2 would solve this, but my last attempt just hung my system mid-install (and I needed to do a lot to recover). I’m tempted just to rename the IE exe file so that the program won’t run, but since evil Microsoft may have programmed in all kinds of subterranean connections between the browser and the OS, I’m wary of doing so. Any advice? (Advice of the form “You should buy a Mac” will not improve my immediate situation or mood.)

The “pro-war British”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/10/15/does_she_exaggerate.php “blogs”:http://www.pootergeek.com/index.php?p=456 seem to be linking to and discussing “an article”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15464 in David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine which alleges that the UK is in the grip of a frightening epidemic of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. In the words of one of their number, “Melanie Phillips”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/000842.html :

bq. This article describes vividly what it’s like to be an American and a Jew facing the tsunami of anti-American and anti-Jewish hatred that has swept over Britain

I’m neither American nor a Jew, so I hesitate somewhat to downplay these reports. Certainly unthinking anti-Americanism — of the kind depicted in Whit Stillman’s film “Barcelona”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109219/ — is a feature of European political and social life. (Only the other day, a supermarket checkout assistant told me that “after all, Michael Moore is just another fat American”.) And anti-semitism also exists in a number of forms: there’s a residual British conservative strain of it and it has come to infect some of the discourse of anti-Israeli polemic on the Left. But American and Jewish friends and colleagues do not tell me of hostility of the kind recounted in the article, and the judicious Jonathan Edelstein reports in “comments to one of the blogs discussing the alleged phenomenon”:http://www.pootergeek.com/index.php?p=456 :

bq. I’m a fairly frequent visitor to London and just returned from four days there, where I hung out with quite a few Guardian and Independent-readers, some of them avowedly Marxist. None of them had any problem with me as an American, a Jew or a Zionist – we had some lively arguments, certainly, but none of them degenerated to personal abuse, anti-semitism or “Israel is a pirate state” rhetoric. I’ve never encountered that kind of crap in the UK, although I’m sure it exists; there are idiots everywhere. The reception of Americans in London probably has a great deal to do with the particular people they meet.

I’d be interested to hear of other experiences.

I’m five years too late, and McNeil PPC has beaten me to the name, but it struck me the other night[1] that iModium.com would have been the ideal name for an Internet/telecom/dotcom IPO in the late 1990s.

fn1. There was no medical reason for this thought, just a random neural connection