ClixyPlays

Meet: The Newest God

2009-03-28T23:06:00.002+01:00

Flying Spaghetti Monster. Thought it was a nice picture on Compfight. This 'thing' has been declared a Deity (god) by an American student. That student then went on to found an official Flying Spaghetti Monster religion which he called Pastafarianism. The 'religion' was quite popular within no time because many Americans were fed up with Intelligent Design as an explanation for the Big Bang.

clipped from www.flickr.com

Earth hour

2009-03-28T22:18:00.001+01:00

Don't forget - Earth Hour! This annual Vote for Mother Earth is gaining in popularity. Edinburgh Castle has switched off the lights.

clipped from www.globalwarmingisreal.com

Tomorrow evening, March 28th, at 8:30PM, is your chance, no matter where you are in the world, to "vote for the Earth" by turning off your lights for one hour (and your television, computer, etc.)

Hulu's Launch Could Set Precedent For Written Media

2008-03-21T19:17:00.000+01:00

Television is changing ho established corporations’ approach new demands by Internet-serviced audiences. Trailblazing deals in the TV industry that signal profound change among viewers could set a precedent for written media.
At the very least, the deals should provide inspiration.

Yesterday’s full-blast launch to U.S. TV audiences of Hulu.com, the YouTube competitor service scrambled together by NBC and Fox, LionsGate and Sony Pictures Television, underpins this. The new site allows American viewers to watch TV shows, including advertising, online for free. Hulu.com already is wildly popular because it allows people to watch shows in their own time, rather than being determined by an agenda set by the tv stations.

In a counter move, YouTube has opened its API to developers so that it will be able to compete through being more widely embedded in other sites. It has also improved its own site. Users now are advised not to download shows for which they don’t have the modem speed, for instance.

Joost.com, a similar service set up by Skype inventors which aims to reach international audiences, also launched a new package yesterday. According to its creators all went better than expected.

I am not going to write an entire post about the TV industry, but want to point out the major difference between written media and TV entertainment; written media can also repackage and release its content but it will always remain slightly limited by the clock for news coverage. After all, news is real; it needs to happen before the dissemination process can begin. The platforms that dish out the news are already visited by people who designate their own time to the consumption of the news.

The prime lesson to be learned perhaps is in the packaging. Throwing stuff from competing institutions together to make an extra valuable tool for targeted advertising appears to be a workable concept. Aggregation logic in the news media runs on totally different numbers, but it always has done, so there’s little to worry over when you see that two major tv stations are having to cluster together to stay competitive.

I guess.

International Condemnation For Violence Against Tibetans

2008-03-17T22:45:00.001+01:00

The international community has strongly condemned the Chinese clampdown on Tibet protesters. Reports indicate that between 30 to over 100 people have been killed in the protests. The actor Richard Gere has called for a boycott of the Olympics.

The Tibet protest has led to the killing of up to an estimated 100 people thus far and international outcry has been voiced from various quarters.

Barack Obama, the Democratic Presidential candidate issued a strong condemnation, saying "This is the year of the Beijing Olympics. It represents an opportunity for China to show the world what it has accomplished in the last several decades. Those accomplishments have been extraordinary and China's people have a right to be proud of them, but the events in Tibet these last few days unfortunately show a different face of China."

Richard Gere, the Hollywood actor, urged for a boycott of the Games saying this would draw attention to the Tibetan cause.

The India residing Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who is known for his wish to see a 'cultural autonomy' rather than outright independence for Tibet, confirmed that between 30 to over 100 people had been killed. He said he felt "deep concern" and urged China to deal with the "resentment of the Tibetan people through dialogue". He called on the Tibetans not to use violence; "I also urge my fellow Tibetans not to resort to violence."

The protests which started in the Tibetal capital Lhasa, spread to various other cities, including in India, Nepal, Australia and China itself. Apart from in Lhasa, where shops were set on fire and dozens of people were killed, Indian police also took harsh action and the protests turned violent.

The UK leader Gordon Brown also expressed his concern saying "We are very concerned about what is happening in Tibet. We have asked for more information about what is going on and we will keep this matter under review."

Last Friday the Nepalese authorities, faced with up to 500 people staging a peaceful sit in outside the UN building in the capital, gave in to Chinese diplomatic pressure to close the south side of Everest for a week in May, while the Chinese Olympic torch team is on the mountain. Reason? Protesters might cause a PR embarrassment.

Tibetan monks in China from the Labrang monastery went on a march together with hundreds of Tibetans. The march turned into a riot and government buildings were attacked and windows of the police headquarters were broken. The protest ended when the police fired tear gas.

In Sydney, protesters scaled a wall surrounding China's consulate and removed the Chinese national flag and tried to replace it with a Tibetan flag. Four people were arrested when police used pepper spray to disperse the crowd after a plain clothes officer had been attacked.

Tibet's government-in-exile urged the United Nations to intervene to end what it called "urgent human rights violations" by China in the region.

Online Democracy And e-Governing

2008-03-09T15:41:00.000+01:00

We are currently witnessing a hype of idealism online. Social networks and crowdsourcing initiatives seem to thrive on and propel unprecedented amounts of karma. How are governments fitting in?

This is the prime issue to address if you want to find out whether the increased idealism is actually resulting in higher levels of democracy. e-Government sites offer good measurement tools. You might find cool devices from the corporate sector too, but these tend to inform you of one thing only; brands and their impact. The latter is increasingly being seen as an important democratic indicator and perhaps this is a good development. After all, if our choices increasingly reflect decisions that we're taking, being part of entire production/manufacturing processes, our notion of democratic input is accordingly spreading from the realm of politics only to the realm of production too.

Brand measurement per se is not my cup of tea; I have no desire to find out what the hell the latest crisp brand is doing on my kitchen shelf. I am an avid crowdsource platform participant, but I ain't that convinced that my attitudes are changing to the level of crisp awareness... There is a dynamics involved in crowdsourcing which incites consumer choice and which is tilting the balance toward consumer decisions. That dynamics takes activity away from the producers, so it's pointless trying to capitalize on the type of democracy consumers are ontologizing. Completely different issues are important in democratic input in the production spheres.

Government initiatives at (e-)democracy for the time being make a lot more sense because they are that much more open to suggestions from the ground. Plus whenever you search for studies, you get more diverse, sensical, headlines. 'Does promoting community participation in governance help build social capital?', is such a headline.

The study behind it, carried out in the UK on behalf of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, draws on a rigorous review of academic evidence and original research. The researchers, a team from Demos, went to two deprived neighbourhoods in the UK (- Ely and Careau in Cardiff, and Benchill in Wythenshawe, Manchester) trying to find out the answer to this question.

In doing so, the researchers temporarily place the government at the total opposite end of the spectrum as the corporate sector. By picking a virtually impossible field (less than 1% of the population in these areas have healthy government links), the outcome is likely as predictable as the measurement studies of corporate sector driven researchers are. However, the government sponsored studies are as direly needed as corporations' efforts are wasteful and annoying.

The logic of modern life is at best ironic. The Rowntree study found the neighborhoods to be tiny microcosms of a world where the rich get richer. The key factor influencing the low level of participation in governance turned out to be that those already well-connected tended to get better connected.

The researchers devised ideas to improve the situation, building on the notion that there's growing evidence that some social networks enable citizens to work together to tackle problems for themselves. The project was a test of the limits of 'social capital'.

They focused on a concept known as 'linking social capital'. The theory is that involving people in the governance of services, government/community members' relationships are built.

During the fieldwork, researchers identified six core influences, which worked in interrelated pairs, grouped under the umbrella terms inequity, exclusivity and dependency.

Inequity
Preferential attachment: The networks surrounding participation tended to have a few nodes only.
The rich get richer: Participation confers benefits which do not necessarily 'trickle down' to non-participants. Individuals who gain 'linking social capital' through participation in governance increase their likelihood of continuing to gain more linking social capital.

Exclusivity
Closure: The value of linking social capital may come from preventing others from accessing it. It can suit public sector partners to work with some community representatives rather than others, and it can suit those representatives to be the community voices that public sector partners listen to in decision-making.
Self-exclusion: The study found at least three reasons why people opted out of activities in which, in theory, it served their interest to be involved. Some people simply decided that governance was not for them.

Dependency
Community dependency: "Those who shout loudest get somewhere," said one of the interviewees. "But who is going to ring up those people who weren't at the meeting and ask them if everything is ok?"
Institutional dependency: "There is a tendency to over-use the key people", one community activist said, explaining how institutions themselves also play a key part in fostering a culture of dependency on a small community elite. "As soon as you start going to one meeting or other the vultures come in," she said. There is often a temptation to go for the quick fix of recruiting an existing community participant who is a known quantity, rather than to invest scarce time and resources in attracting new people who may not end up participating fully or who may drop out.

The project was conducted in two of the UK's poorest areas and the researchers staked a very odd sounding claim in their study; that if the government could achieve a goal of a 1% participation rate, this would build some (instead of none) social capital. It gives you an idea of the situation.

Mobilise participation by 1 per cent of citizens and something of a viral element might be spiralling into effect; "Embed this [1%] in the wider rhythms and routines of community life", the researchers suggest.
They added seven ideas illustrating how the solution might work;

- Backing social entrepeneurs
- Disconnecting and reconnecting (to remove the barriers)
- Building trust gradually
- Involving other citizens
- Long-term capacity building for participation
- Making participation a national priority
- Refashioning the role of local councillors

Other democracy inspired initiatives such as People and Participation are online and list lots of different community projects that show an idealism of the first order. These initiatives are mostly new. The great thing is that aside from providing an impetus that works interdependently, many of the projects are likely going to be measured too.

Who Does Your Kid Resemble More?

2008-03-09T12:21:00.005+01:00

A new genealogy site allows you to upload a picture of your kid, your (ex) spouse and your self and have them analyzed on facial features. The face analysis meter indicates who your kid resembles more. In my case, our 12 year old son resembles me 4% more. On other pictures my ex scored better, but I think that objectively speaking the 4% is just about right. There's also a celebrity morphing tool on that site.

I myself look 6% more like my mother:

Researchers: There Is No Link Between War And Poverty

2008-03-06T14:48:00.000+01:00

A higher carbon footprint is negatively correlated with the outbreak of war and control for income effects, say Norwegian political scientists.

The Norwegian scientists collated historic evidence about war situation and environmental settings globally over the years 1961-1999 and found that there is no support for the regular Neomalthusan theory - the theory that says wars are caused by dwindling food sufficiency.

In an article published in the peer-reviewed journal Population and Environment, researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) say the theory that wars are mainly caused by a country’s food production failing to keep up with its population growth, is untrue. Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) said that starvation, war and early death regulates the balance between food availability and population numbers. That means that the bulk of the population would live a minimalist existence.

Malthus' theory is pretty much standardly accepted theory among political scientists and sociologists. They see climate change and over-consumption of natural resources as a modern day illustration of Malthus’ theory.

Accepting the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, former US Vice President Al Gore Jr. made sure to underline this once more too, saying that ”Extensive climate changes may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of mankind. They may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth’s resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world’s most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states.”

The Norwegian political scientists say their research findings suggests that there is no connection between environmental crises and armed conflict.

They studied the environmental pressures in 150 countries in the period from 1961 to 1999. "By using an internationally recognized technique for measuring a country’s environmental sustainability, the ecological footprint, the researchers were able to compare these numbers with statistics on armed conflict during the same period.

The scientists' conclusion may seem paradoxical. "[Countries] where resources are heavily exploited show a clear connection to a lack of armed conflict", they found. Or alternatively, nations troubled by war during the research period had lower exploitation rates of their natural resources. The findings give researchers solid empirical support for stating that environmental scarcity is not the reason behind violent conflict.

The scientists say that there are of course exceptions. They also studied examples of recent areas stricken by conflicts and say that it can't be denied that some of these are caused by natural resource scarcity. Darfur, Sudan, Rwanda, Haiti and Somalia are examples of this.

"I have seen with my own eyes how climate change and resource scarcity, particularly when it comes to water and grazing lands, can fuel tensions", says Jan Egeland, director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI).

Egeland is the former UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. He used to be responsible for refugee issues, and has seen many conflicts across the globe that surely could have been caused by environmental crises.

In his previous job, Egeland has gone on the record saying that the Darfur conflict was the result of an environmental crisis. But following this research work, he said, he's now a little more uncertain of such a causal connection.

Malthus lived well before the later technological breakthroughs, such as the Green Revolution. This has 'altered his bleak global caloric intake equation', Binningsbø said.

The researchers relied in their ecological research on techniques developed by the Global Footprint Network, which specializes in measuring a country’s resource consumption compared to its ecological capacity.

The method is widely used as a measurement technique, but has also been criticised. Researchers have argued that the method can only be applied on a global basis, in as much as countries trade with each other, and therefore aren’t necessarily solely dependent on their own natural resources.

New Trend - Having Your Postal Mail Delivered Online

2008-03-06T14:25:00.001+01:00

If there's any trend that's without a doubt both confirmed and global it's everybody's hate for junk mail. A new company is raising venture capital to eliminated junk mail and step up company recycling efforts by 500%.

The company is called Earthmail.com and already it's taking the world by storm. Its founder Ron Wiener has a compelling business pitch; companies and private persons can reduce their carbon footprint and boost their productivity by having Earthclass Mail scan their mail and put it online. Just like email! This way you can eliminate unwanted mail before it arrives on your desk and clutters up the spare office space.

Wiener wants to open up in over 20 U.S. cities and is today participating in a real life reality style soap about business pioneers called StartupJunkies. The show is aired by Mojo, a hi-def tv producer and the soap is likely going to a big part of the fundraising effort.

Wiener already pitched his business before Californian, Colorado and Barcelona investors members of an angel investor community called K4. The man’s most luring catch phrase no doubt is “See how easily your organization can witness the biggest boost in productivity and cost savings since the introduction of email.”

Let's hope the investor gives Wiener light of day because that man is worth his weight in gold. His idea takes the incentive out of the junkmail persistence for good! By aggregating the paper stacks of corporations, the recycling effort could finally take off in earnest.

People Search Engine Spock Capitalises On The Success Of Social Networks

2008-03-05T00:17:00.003+01:00

Spock.com - The Best For People Search is a recently launched people search engine which is growing rapidly. Type in the name of a person you want to look up online and you will find them in the click of a mouse. Spock is like any normal social network, but the people that populate it have not necessarily sourced the information themselves.

Spock offers instant links to a person’s personal pages on social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Twitter and many more. Plus you can see all their network contacts on Spock.

If you wonder just how reliable its listed info is if it ain’t volunteered by the subject in question, there’s a voting mechanism that allows people to vote. Also, the network’s administrators will remove content that people object to. So while outsiders can source pictures, news articles, web addresses, and potentially rather sensitive details, most of the people profiled will have provided the information themselves.

Spock is a trend that is growing rapidly and the reason is that the company has found a niche that normal social networks bypass. The comprehensive approach and search friendly experience definitely is valuable.

Other than searching for people by name, you can also look up search results according to likes and dislikes, profession or clubs that people are members of. For instance, if you are looking for a green building specialist, you’ll find a certain Robert Wisniewski, topping the list of 19 results.

Mind you, he’s the only real green building specialist of the lot. Plus, Wisniewski’s personal profile is lifted directly from a company website. But offsetting that the rest of the information is highly useful because not only do you have direct access to Wisniewski’s personal pages on all kinds of social networks, but you also find tonnes of articles about people like him under the google search entries. Even though the service obviously needs time to build up steam, the comprehensive approach that Spock uses will definitely catch on.

New Documents Reveal Information On How Hitler Used The Stars

2008-03-04T17:46:00.000+01:00

British Secret Service agents have a longstanding reputation for the inconceivable ways in which they operate. News just out in the UK reveals that during World War II, secret agents employed the services of a horoscope expert. Just like Hitler did.

The documents that revealed this information were first released Monday 3 March by the National Archives. An astrologer by the name of Louis de Wohl apparently convinced British secret agents that Hitler was strongly palatable to astrology.

Hitler, so de Wohl told the secret agents, listened very carefully to the advice of his own horoscope expert, a Swiss guy named Karl Ernst Krafft. To gain insight into the often unpredictable plans of Hitler, it was very important that the Brits took readings of the stars themselves too, de Wohl argued, pitching his own candidacy for the job. The espionage chiefs bought it and De Wohl soon became a respected advisor to the Defense chiefs. De Wohl suggested, in a memo to a mentor Sir Charles Hambro that "shadowing" his counterpart's predictions would be a good idea. "The system according to which Hitler is advised is universal, and, being mathematical, has nothing whatsoever to do with clairvoyance or mystic matters," he wrote in a letter that was first released last Monday.

De Wohl traveled to the US in 1941 where he held lectures to convince the Americans that Hitler could be defeated. De Wohl appealed to the Yanks to intervene in the European situation.

De Wohl as a person was not beyond reproach; he claimed to be a Hungarian aristocrat but everybody doubted that. He was born and raised in Berlin and arrived in London in 1935, where he rapidly became known for his flamboyancy among the rich and famous. He was officially hired by the Ministry of Defense in 1940.

After the war De Wohl's claims were probed by historians and members of staff of MI5 and MI6 (the UK secret service), who said that his predictions seldomly came true. And some historians claimed as early as 1945 that Hitler had never taken astrology seriously.

However, the files, released at the National Archives at Kew, suggest that some of his predictions might even have come true.

But De Wohl also had his victorious moments; "He appears to have forecast the German invasion of Crete, the Battle of Midway to within a few days and Montgomery's desert success against the German Field Marshal, Erwin Rommel", Ananova reports.

The Ananova reporters quote Prof Christopher Andrew, who is writing the official history of MI5, as saying that "Hitler regarded astrology as nonsense, but the belief that he really paid attention to horoscopes entered Whitehall."

Freedom Of Expression In Cuba? Students Are On For It!

2008-02-25T09:40:00.004+01:00

Cubans are going through an important change yet there are few reports from inside the country that reach us, compared to the plethora of news items that international agencies churn out about this country's hated leader.

The mainstream media are devoting a lot of attention to the changeover and the voting process that facilitates it, but bloggers on the ground are alerting us to some other signals. It’s been only a few days that a video which had been sent anonymously to the BBC circulated on the web, showing a few Cuban students who openly criticised their government in front of Parliamentary President Ricardo Alarcón.

A blogger who wrote about the issue for ObserversFrance.com (also the link to the e video) says she had difficulty believing her eyes watching the video. “It’s not easy to imagine. But it's true,” she writes.

It appears that people have difficulty believing this happened, let alone predict what's next. “Is the nearing end of Fidel Castro's reign bringing about improvements in freedom of speech, or is it a publicity stunt to better outside views of the authorities?”, the Havana blogger writes. A few days later she wrote an update with news about the temporary disappearance of Eliecer Avila, one of the protesting students. She said he appeared on Cuban tv, saying that the foreign media had ‘manipulated' his statement. Well, if anything, let's be happy he appeared again.

The end of the Fidel days are not expected to lead to much change in the country. Everybody knows that the fate of this small island is largely in the hands of Washington. And the Americans are demanding that the situation on the ground, ie the political democracy, improves, before it will lift the 46-year embargo. All Presidential candidates in the US elections race issued reactions to the Castro resignation that unanimously demanded improved democracy.

Castro’s brother is credited with the agricultural reforms and could issue some more changes. He has been brainstorming since the summer of 2006 for economic reforms and is quoted as saying he is all for openness. Many Cubans dread what will happen if Fidel dies because they have been sat in the guagmire where unexpected things simply have been a no no since 1959. Castro has outlasted 9 US presidents, the fall of the Soviet empire and he's even exported his own brand of communism abroad to Venezuela.

New York Times Bestsellers Don't Come Cheap

2008-02-22T10:05:00.007+01:00

The New York Times best seller list is a fad. You've known it for years, I've known it for years. But the way the ranking is compiled remains a secret. Nevertheless the decision this week by a best seller's authors to abandon product placement in their book follows intense criticism from among others the NYT editorial. So what's acceptable in best seller marketing?

The secrecy surrounding best seller lists is both intriguing and a sore point. Nobody seems to have a clue about the quality of the books listed. There’s been speculation for years about a black dagger that appears next to some titles on NYT best seller books. Presumably, it’s evidence of bulk buying, but nobody really knows.

The allegation that bulk buying takes place and that it’s a crime is totally justified; after all, readers would want to think that they’re reading a book that made it to best seller status because many others thought it deserved that. But just like you can’t tell from an average book shelf whether the books on it have been read, the best seller list is also more or less a status symbol that everybody is after nevertheless.

More questionable than bulk buying is when the people that are responsible for filling up actual pages, the writers, get in on the dirt. Take Cathy’s Book: If Found Call (650) 266-8233 a NYT best seller for teenagers written by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman. The authors included 'product placement' into the book; they agreed with Cover Girl to have the protagonist wear their lipstick and by means of compensation, the book was promoted on beinggirl.com the Procter & Gamble exploit. Commercial Alert, Ralph Nader's group, took immediate offense and ordered editors and reviewers to give it thumbs down. Even The New York Times wrote a critical review. What the editors forget is that people will find it hard to believe their editorial itself is independent.

The criticism has had its effect because next Monday, the book paperback version of the book comes out without any sponsorship. I am not sure I like this. Somehow some idiots have decided it’s time to ‘protect’ teeny girlies. Or so. Despite the fact that any 11-year old knows how the world functions. I would imagine that teenagers will feel, if anything, deprived due to this action. It’s de facto signal that the corporate world is beyond fixing - yet another great message.

Marketing of books is often presumed an afterthought, but if you read the literary pages and pay attention to the war of ideologies’ sponsorships battles you won’t be surprised at the vast hinterland. Writers pay good money, it appears, to learn the tricks of the trade. One program that claims to offer up-to-date book insider tips is John Kremer’s 1001Ways to Market Your Books. “The New York Times bestseller list is essentially a work of fiction,” Kremer says on his website. “As a result, it can be — and is — manipulated by those who know how the list is compiled. Publishers do it all the time. [....] Even an unknown author can use the same techniques to propel his or her book to the top of the bestseller list,” Kremer says.

And guess what, Kremer himself is offering good money for people to preach his gospel. He offers widgets to bloggers to write about his book. To me, there’s nothing wrong with this. What I find offensive is that the very same people that push books to the top by completely hidden means now get away claiming the moral high ground by condemning product placement in a teen book. To me that reaks of deformed thinking that’s messed up beyond recognition. What’s next, the veil for teeny ‘whores’?

Green Drinks Are Becoming All The Rage All Over The Globe

2008-02-20T01:17:00.002+01:00

Green drinking buddies? They exist! Every month, green group drinks take place in over 320 bars around the world. Green Drinks meetings are attended by people working in NGOs, academia, government and business. Just say 'are you green?', and then whoosh, networking!

The group´s organisers say Green Drinks is an organic, self organising network. It appears that´s right. The network already is in these countries; UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, Sweden, The Netherlands, Afghanistan, Argentina, Belgium, Belize, Brazil, Chile, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka and Switzerland.

Contact your local branche and see if you can join. If there´s no Green Drinks in your home town, email the organisers for tips on how you can set it up in your town; edwin [at] greendrinks [dot] org.

Tweetmeme Ranks Your Links Into Twitter According To Popularity

2008-02-16T18:20:00.004+01:00

Data mining social networks is quite a challenge. Imagine walking on a busy street and trying to make sense of all the conversations around you at once. It is humanly impossible. Yet computer programs can handle the task. The more interesting mashups tend to be successful at capturing human activities at the perifery of our existence and present them in context.

Take Twitter, the hugely popular chattering service. The mashups that mine the data meaningfully are those that group and categorise human statements so we can make sense of them. One of the latest Twitter mashups is called Tweetmeme and it categorises the most frequently linked-to sites on Twitter.

Tweetmeme is the latest in a series of add-on Twitter websites. Roughly speaking, many of these efforts involve the separation of the general chatter from the links that people happen to mention whilst they're Twittering. Tweetmeme identifies links by their category, ie blogs, videos, images or audio and feeds these into RSS.

Tweetmeme's real value is that it gives you a great idea about what's alive in higher cyber regions.

The Latest Trends In Printing? Green Technology!

2008-02-14T03:43:00.002+01:00

A company called GreenPrint has invented a printing program that scans printouts for content that users are not likely to read before printing. Things like images and banner ads are eliminated from the printouts unless you specify otherwise. The program is compatible to all Microsoft Windows based systems. It also allows you to create even more economical PDF documents.

I have downloaded the program and it works great. It saves me from adjusting the margins in IE7, something I do whenever I print documents and which has saved me pages and pages of paper and printing toner. GreenPrint's software calculates exactly what amount of paper, money, and greenhouse gases you are saving by using the program. This is quite interesting.

An individual will on average save up to $90 a year, GreenPrint says. That’s the equivalent of more than 1,400 pages. The company says that if the number of users sign up for its program that they’re expecting to sign up, some 100 million trees could be prevented from being chopped down. That is the equivalent of 300 million tons of greenhouse gases.

A case study on GreenPrint's website details the contribution to the environment that a big pharmaceutical company made in just over 11 months. Their environmental report card shows that they contributed to 6,298 trees left standing, saving 1,858,876 gallons of water, cutting energy usage by 1,094,688 kilowatt hours (the equivalent to heating and cooling 47 houses for a year), preventing 823 cubic yards of solid waste being dumped in landfills, cutting air pollution back by 15,522 pounds. Imagine! That's only 11 months! There’s a free printer program as well as a paid downloadable program. The latter offers ad free print previews and tech support.

Download the program here.

GreenPrint has also invented a new font which is 20 percent more narrow than Arial, Helvetica and Times New Roman fonts. Called 'EverGreen', the new font (see picture) is the first in a series, GreenPrint promises. More eco friendly fonts will hit the market later in the year.

The Planet Needs You And These Are Your Tools

2008-02-14T03:43:00.001+01:00

Was it only yesterday that I wrote about the below India ranking that the US scored on a Yale scorecard of environmental/agricultural/health gdp-linked indicators? Today another double whammy dosis of worrisome news from the UK.

The report in question is entitled "Health Effects of Climate Change in the UK”. It's written by scientists of the Health Protection Agency and predicts chances that a heat wave will occur before 2012 are 25% which will claim thousands of lives.

The report, authored by the UK's Health Protection Agency is shockingly alarming in many ways. But its writers are outlining worst case scenarios and the effects with no aim other than to inform health officials what they should be prepared for.

The death toll is estimated to run as high as 10,000 people. If temperatures average at least 27 degrees over 24 hours, some 3,000 immediate deaths would occur.

The 'best' statistics available of the hazards are the 2003 French heatwave which had an official death toll of 14,000 people. The UK health officials' report arrived at a politically opportune moment because Downing Street is putting a plan together for the health sector to deal with global warming related disease.

Hospitals are told to prepare for malaria outbreaks because rising temperatures mean there's a bigger risk of outbreaks of diseases transferred by musquitoes and ticks. Even if a disease might not originate in the UK, warm weather might trigger an epidemic that was transferred from people who travel overseas, the UK government believes.

Air pollution is another big worry. The authors of the Health Protection Agency's report say that hospitals should count on an estimated 1,500 deaths and hospital admissions annually as a result of it. Food poisoning is believed to rise by 15% due to warmer weather. That amounts to 14,000 cases a year. Other than health hazards there are also increased chances of floods.

Is it me or does it really begin to feel like we need to take climate change seriously? When people talk about 'doing my bit for the planet' the phrase is mostly used as an expression of smallness. But if you read up on what you actually can do, you'll be surprised at how easy most options are. Better tools become available every day that allow you to calculate the direct impact in kilos of carbon emissions. If you want to start doing something, find a calculator (I have listed general (energy) calculators, water, paper, printer, car and aviation calculators on my other blog. If you live in the UK, you can also opt for an iGoogle calculator which allows you to track everything you contribute to the planet. You can visit my other blog here: http://amplifiedgreen.wordpress.com.

we need to realise that every little bit counts.

US Underperforms India In Environment Study

2008-02-13T22:11:00.001+01:00

The US ranks at the bottom of the G8 in a Yale/Columbia Universities report studying environmental and social factors. India scores better than the US, which only narrowly outperforms China.

The report features global trends and reveals close links between gross domestic product per capita, greenhouse gas emissions/agricultural policies and sanitation, indoor air quality, as well as a country's success in fighting disease.

The top ten of the list, in which countries can score 100 at best on the combined indicators as well as 20 other measures, is heavily populated by European countries. Switserland leads, earning its top place because of a greenhouse gas efficient policies mostly.

The researchers were impressed with its use of hydroelectric power and the Swiss railway dominated transport system in general. The number two spot was taken by Sweden, followed by Norway and Finland, Austria, France, Latvia, Costa Rica, Colombia and New Zealand, which scored 87 points. In a similar study released in 2006, New Zealand, now tenth, was the top performer. The researchers assigned climate change a heavier weighting in their most recent study, which accounts for New Zealand's fall.

The US, with a score of 81.0, ranked 39th on the list. In terms of regional smog, the US was the absolute bottom of all 149 surveyed countries. The results were presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month. An FT poll asking `What Should Be The Top Of The Agenda At Davos?´ underscored the survey's actuality; `Climate change´ topped the list at 25.1%, followed closely by ´US recession´ (18.4%). Poverty was third, scoring 15%.

The Bush administration says it is planning a program to cut ozone damaging emissions by 90% in ten years. The focus is on cutting diesel emissions from heavy vehicles like trucks and diesel powered building equipment. Such a move would be welcome news but let’s also hope that greenhouse gas emissions are toned down because at a quarter of the new releases of greenhouse gas emissions, the US’ record is shameful. That’s not least because over the last few years this situation has deteriorated.

Staples, The US Office Retailer, Becomes 'Environmentally Correct'

2008-02-12T10:46:00.002+01:00

The paper sector is an obvious a target for green activism, so this weekend’s breaking news that office supplies retailer Staples severed all ties with its Singaporean paper supplier because of environmental concerns shouldn’t be that surprising. But the events that led to Staples’ move are an eye opener; a Wall Street Street Journal reporter discovered that the company was going to use its Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) logo and tipped off the FSC about the environmental policies of APP.

APP’s paper producing methods incited environmental concerns first in 2004 when Greenpeace pointed out that it in part relies on natural rainforests for its production of paper. A hoist of US, Asian and European companies terminated their contracts with APP, one after the other in recent years. All cited environmental concerns as their reason. The giant retailer Office Depot Inc. is also in the list.

The WSJ reporter’s action resulted in the FSC’s objection to Staples’ use of its label. The certification is considered the world's most stringent, and ensures responsible management of the world’s forests at miller level. A Staples spokesman last weekend told the Wall Street Journal “We decided engagement was not possible anymore. We haven't seen any indication that APP has been making any positive strides [to protect the environment.]”. He added that staying in business with APP would come "at great peril to our brand."

It's obvious; Staples is concerned that its customers won’t be enamored with forest destructive paper production methods. APP has a policy of producing paper from newly planted forests but says that due to huge demand, it needs to cut trees from mature rainforests as well. This practice is, in the Wall Street’s Journal’s terms, ‘having an impact on big U.S. paper buyers’.

The big question now of course is whether APP, one of the world’s largest paper manufacturers, will stop its destruction. Its policy thus far has been to deny that it's doing anything wrong. The incentive is rather limited; Staples purchased only around 9% of its total paper supplies from APP and roughly 5% of this concerned paper. The WSJ didn’t manage to get a reply from APP immediately, but perhaps later this week, when Staples officially announces its decision, there will be more information.

Economics Professors Do Not Teach Eco Values - Yet

2008-02-08T00:32:00.002+01:00

Did you know that Green economics is hardly an established concept academically? That is because economists have difficulties believing that anything other than the input in their models reflects reality. But the numbers they so diligently belabor are only valid because everyone else in the game plays by the same rules.

Standard economist models account for the earth’s resources as if they were free and infinite, but the realisation is growing that this is an untenable position. Economics is traditionally highly empirical and the uptake of a new logic will take time. It took us until the 1700s to produce an Adam Smith who had the presence of mind to adopt a systemic approach to the mishmash of Mercantile partying. It's ironic that now that business practices are once again beginning to resemble Mercantile characteristics, it is taking us time again to reconcile it into the Capitalist system, even though the case for it is strong.

Mercantilism is a great concept, even though the term might not be fashionable right now because it has such a bitter taste to it in a macro economic context. But then again, consumer driven pressures for sustainable production might just outpace the initial distaste. What's more, the mixture of demand for green, ecological production processes and mercantilist trading is bound to result in new textbook material in a few years. Professors who train young economists might soon see that it's time to talk a different game.

Watch this video of an alternative proposition on accounting for the earth’s natural resources. A reaction to the movie reads: “You obviously do not understand free markets. Who is making green technology buddy? Its not the government. Its businesses in the ECONOMY that are creating green technology because it is PROFITABLE to do so.” But it seems to me that the tipping point for has moved forward. Various trends show that profitability as a focal point is being replaced by probability.

The mercantilist based economy is already soaring, even if we don't recognise it as such. Take any crowdsource platform and what you witness happening is essentially mercantilist trading. We simply don't use the word but, in true mercantilist fashion we've come up with individual labels as the replacement generic term.

Recently, Business Week dedicated an article to the virtual untraceability of millions and millions of small businesses. This is evidence that language wise there's a gap. But it doesn't mean that organizations of small traders don't exist. In a subsequent article, they featured MerchantCircle.com which is an example of a company that fills the niche of grouping the individual businesses together. MerchantCircle is a kind of interactive Yellow Pages that exploits local to the max.

Small business owners (from around the globe) can register, claim SEO optimized listings for their business and what's the best part; have their customers write referral reviews of their services. The company is very young, under one year, but already it's thriving. Part of its success is due to MerchantCircle’s own brilliant use of word of mouth.

For instance, it is getting bloggers like myself to write about them via the equally ingenious platform creamaid.com. This is another example of a mercantile miracle. Via CreamAid, you can kickstart writing for dollars without being mediated by a reviews brokerage. You pick a topic you were already thinking to blog about and join a conversation by submitting your blog post. The party you review pays you plus you receive traffic from a widget that publicises the conversation in which you've participated. One of my next posts will deal with paid blogging in the green sector.

Airlines That Don't Live Up To Environmental Standards Face Tough Financing In Future

2008-02-08T00:32:00.000+01:00

Negative public perception of companies' environmental policies can no longer be regarded as territory for marketers or advertisers only. Companies now risk their funding if they are not 'green', say financial analysts.

A recent issue of Global Flight reported that airlines are forced to go green not only because of consumer pressures but also because of financial reasons.

Analysts say that airlines that do not have a strategy in place (very soon) to address environmental issues might soon find itself unable to get finance. That is totally at the other end of the spectrum of where the commentator was coming from. It is a first sign that real change in attitude is taking place. You can argue about the effectiveness of the various carbon programs or of purifying the fuels, but at least the hypocrisy factor’s gone down.

The magazine outlines that risk analysists are increasingly giving as much weight to the effect of public perception as to the still uncertain scientific understanding of aviation's precise impact on the environment. Who knows, perhaps the mix of regulations, new European guidelines and financial considerations that together could make or break airlines when it comes to the bottom line, might turn out to become a model development for other industries. “A risk manager will [...] as a matter of course take account of a business's holistic impact on the environment and will subject that to the same level of audit scrutiny as he would traditionally give to a business's balance sheet”, Flight Global writes. It goes on to quote a risk management expert as saying "We don't have to prove we're right about the risk. We just have to prove we may be right."

Further down in the article a (ratings agency) Moody’s Analyst is quoted as saying: "If there is successful adherence by European airlines through a formalised structure, that could well improve access to capital. These airlines could well show the way, be the harbingers of a trend and could ultimately become the model. But they will first have to demonstrate that they are managing these programmes effectively."

The same specialist believes that a new US administration could be positive for the creation of an emissions trading program. If the Open Skies transatlantic air travel liberalisation is going to step up competition in the airline industry, it will also lead to a further internationalision, which might mean that the European initiative could be adopted in the US as well, the analyst said.

Moody's is already working on standardised methods to rate airlines’ pollution in as fair a way as possible. The methodology includes financial metrics and qualitative considerations such as fleet age, fuel hedging strategies and geographic spread of risk. A rating agency is acting as a bridge between the rather inflexible world of industry to the more flexible world of finance and consumers at large.

Green economics is hardly an established concept academically. That is because economists have difficulty believing that anything other than the input in their models reflects reality. But they forget that the numbers they so diligently belabor are only valid because everyone else in the game plays by the same, fallacious, rules.

The biggest misconception by far is of course the concept that the earth’s resources are accounted for with as if they are infinite. Academia might lag behind the times though, because if you look at businesses, especially those ‘blamed’ for some of the worst pollution, a notable change is taking place. Economics is of course a field that is traditionally highly empirical – it took us until the 17 hundreds to have one bright mind think up a systemic approach to the mishmash of Mercantile parties – and who knows, the rule book might be re-written in the not so distant future.

Watch this video of an alternative proposition on the earth’s natural resources. A reaction to the movie reads: “You obviously do not understand free markets. Who is making green technology buddy? Its not the government. Its businesses in the ECONOMY that are creating green technology because it is PROFITABLE to do so.” But it seems that the tipping point is has moved forward. Profitability as a focal point is on its way to being replaced by probability.

Iranian Sisters Sentenced To Death By Stoning For Chatting To Male Admirers

2008-02-07T00:16:00.001+01:00

A woman falsely accused of committing adultery has been sentenced to death by stoning by an Iranian court. Her husband secretly taped video footage of her and her sister's meeting with male admirers to present proof that his wife had been promiscuous. The woman’s sister, has been sentenced to death too.

The two sisters called Zohreh and Azar, will meet a gruesome end. In Iran, women being sentenced to such a fate will be dug in the ground up to their breasts and stones are being thrown until they are dead. This is a long drawn out process because the stones thrown need to be, according to Iranian law prescriptions, big enough to injure, but not so big that the victim is dead within two stones´ throws.

The irony of this whole saga is that the two sisters were not doing anything wrong. The two, who appealed their case in a higher court after having been sentenced to lashes earlier on, claim that the footage shows that they had not committed adultery. The husband of Zohreh’s sister Azar did not press charges. At the moment, around nine women are awaiting a similar fate, as well as two men.

Death by stoning has been an issue within Iranian politics since 2002, when the Iranian legal system´s top official, Mahmoud Hashemi Shahrudi, ordered a moratorium on the penalty and the Iranian parliament is working on a review of Iranian laws, which aims to eliminate death by stoning. But the penalty is definitely popular still because in recent years it has been applied in various cases. Amnesty International has also called for an immediate end to this brutal sentencing. Find out how you can take action here.

Carbon Footprint Calculators Are Specialising In 2008

2008-01-21T23:38:00.000+01:00

Carbon Footprint calculators were the thing of 2007. This year will see the specialisation of these tools. Since January, various component calculators have been launched, including a wine carbon footprint calculator.

The latest of the batch is a Ho2conserve.org's tool (click on the icon in the right bar for the link). The great thing about the tool is that it allows you to calculate your footprint wherever you are in the world. My own water footprint is 414 cubic meters a year. That is well below the average person. The calculations are also based on what food you eat. Do not confuse this with your food carbon footprint. Of the 414 cubic meters I use, the bulk of it, 368 cubic meters, is linked to the food I purchase. The Ho2conserve.org website explains the high number. "[The calculator] takes into account not only the water used in your home, but also the water that is used to produce the food you choose to eat and the products you buy", the website's introduction text reads. "Your water footprint also includes other factors such as the water used to cool the power plants that provide your electricity". That makes sense.

Another nifty device, especially for people living in the UK, is Google's new Carbon Footprint Project. It combines personal information with data on climate change in the whole of the country. The project enables you to calculate your carbon footprint, track personalised carbon-reducing actions and compare footprints or actions to other people's. I don't live in the UK but I have just found the device in my iGoogle gadgets page. You have to change your countries settings to the UK however if you live outside of this country.

If you have never used a general carbon footprint calculator (one that calculates your Co2 emissions in kilograms on the basis of your energy usage) or have done so long ago, give them another go because there have been many improvements. It is advisable to consult your energy supplier's web pages because most companies now offer calculators and many link them to your direct usage numbers. In case you don't find anything, you can always compare the scores on about three different carbon calculators to get the most dependable results.

Business and industry are increasingly ofsetting carbon emissions too. A New Zealand wine growers association launched an international calculator which indicates the greenhouse gas emissions of any given vineyard.

The online business sector is also jumping on the bandwagon, offering programs which claim to support tree planting activities. Only today, the Wall Street Journal blog reported that the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) might start to certify this immaterial goods-based business in the future.

Next In Printing? 3 Dimensional Output!

2008-01-18T21:10:00.000+01:00

Printers have experienced massive innovations the last decade. Next is three dimensional printing. Printers facilitating this might soon be quite affordable.

It sounds too sci-fi to be believable, yet researchers of Cornell University have managed to develop an open source 3D inkjet printer that can manufacture just about anything you can think of.

The best part of it is that due to popular input in the design, the printer is going to be affordable. It's dubbed a fabbing system, in reference to the phrase Fab at Home. But who cares about the semantics? It is going to be your Christmas present about three years down the road, as the new price is set at around $2400.

The system uses a 3D inkjet printing process which, in stead of ink, deposits droplets of plastic.This way, layer by layer, it gradually manufactures an object of any shape.

The inventor, Hod Lipson, sort of casually invented the machine. He wasn’t intent on designing the earth shattering piece of equipment that ordinary manufacturing designers will envy him for, but simply wanted to design a really cool robot, he says.

“One that could “evolve” by reprogramming itself and would also produce its own hardware—a software brain, if you will, with the ability to create a body”, according to an article in Popular Mechanics.com.

Experimenting with the process, Lipson invented what’s known as a rapid-prototyping fabrication, or “fabber.” Nothing all that new, because fabbers have been around for two decades. Until Lipson set out to manufacture his device however, Fabbers had been notoriously expensive that would only be part of the furniture of high tech labs. None of them could use more than one single material.

Lipson’s invention changed all of this. Not only the cost picture but also the technical capability of the machine. “To really let this robotic evolutionary process reach its full potential we need a machine that can fabricate anything, not just complex geometry, but also wires and motors and sensors and actuators,” Lipson was quoted as saying in Popular Mechanics.

He and a few other grad students did the thing that you and I would also do in a similar situation; they crowdsourced the issue. The result is the Fab at Home. Apparently the machine is as weird as our ancestors would only have dared dream about; it uses virtually any ground material, including foodstuffs like Easy Cheese and chocolate, but also other materials including epoxy and metal-powder-impregnated silicones.

The Top Fashion Cities Of 2007 - Ranked By Media Coverage

2008-01-14T21:06:00.000+01:00

An algorithm that tracks media and blogosphere attention for fashion has compiled an unusual Fashion City 2007 Top 25. Breaking into the most frequently media-mentioned list of fashion cities were Berlin, Shanhai, Moscow and Dubai.
Topping the list for 2007 are New York, Rome, Paris, London, Milan, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Las Vegas, and Singapore.

Bizarre rankings included Shanghai at No. 14, Sydney and Melbourne at Nos. 12 and 15 respectively, and the Fashion Quartet of South America: Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Palo, and Buenos Aires.

Bottom of the list at No. 25 was Krakow. This city made the ranking "because of its emerging status as center of neo-Bohemian influence", Global Language Monitor, a US language consultancy who conducted the review, said.

The ranking is surprising not least because cities that recently would have been considered fashion backwaters, are emerging as significant regional hubs.

GLM created the ranking using its Predictive Quantities Index, a proprietary algorithm which tracks words and phrases in the media and throughout the blogosphere. The words and phrases are tracked in relation to their frequency, contextual usage and appearance in global media outlets.

Rank
1. New York -- Far and away No.1 by every index
2. Rome -- Beats out Paris, London and Milan
3. Paris -- Heartbeat of the fashion world
4. London -- Pulsing with creative energy
5. Milan -- Perennial contender for No. 1
6. Tokyo -- Gaining global influence
7. Los Angeles -- Will Posh Spice impact Ranking?
8. Hong Kong -- No. 1 in South Asia
9. Las Vegas -- Emerging as vibrant fashion center
10. Singapore -- Strong regional hub
11. Berlin -- Big fashion push & its working
12. Sydney -- OZ scores two in the Top 20
13. Barcelona -- Regional center grows in stature
14. Shanghai -- China breaks into the Big Time
15. Melbourne -- Gold Coast is golden for fashion
16. Moscow -- Lenin would not be amused
17. Bangkok -- Realizing its dream
18. Mumbai -- Indian fashion influences globe
19. Santiago -- Major strides for a proud nation
20. Rio de Janeiro -- More than Carnivale and Ipanema
21. Sao Paolo -- Money and fashion DO mix
22. Buenos Aires -- Seat of Classic Beauty returns
23. Johannesburg -- A first for Africa
24. Dubai Dubai? -- Yes, Dubai,
25. Krakow -- Neo-Bohemia thrives

Flickr Lends Itself Brilliantly For Making Movies!

2008-01-09T21:04:00.000+01:00

Flickeur, pronounced like ‘Voyeur’, is an art project that you can see every day without tiring of it. The video clip retrieves random images from fresh Flickr stock and creates an infinite film that resembles a stream of consciousness.

All the blends, motions, zooms or timeleaps are completely random. The result is stunning even though the project is very simple.

Flickeur works like a looped film. 'Magnetic images will merge with older materials and be influenced by the older recordings’ magnetic memory', the project’s creator Mario Klingemann says.

The virtual tape also plays and records forward and backward to create another layer of randomness. This principle will create its own, sometimes suggestive, sometimes scary, sometimes funny story.

Worth seeing.

Recycling Takes Off Big Time - Find Out What's Happening In Your Town!

2008-01-05T20:41:00.001+01:00

Landfills are fast becoming fashionable. Languagewise, that is. But while all the buzz in the media builds up on our wasteful habits, part of the solution is an equally fashionable trend to consider giving items away that haven’t overstayed their welcome just yet. Freecycle.org is a global platform that enables you to do that.

The Freecycle network already is a registered trademark. That's because it's so successful. Made up of 4,275 groups worldwide, it has 4,608,000 members. One of the secrets why it is so successful is that it inspires people to give as well as to receive. Freecycle is a non profit grassroots movement of people who swap stuff in their own towns. "It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills and each local group is moderated by a local volunteer", says its founder.

Big corporations are also in on it. A San Jose (CA) newspaper reported recently that “A truckload of diapers, clothes and supplies was collected through Freecycle for an orphanage in Haiti. FedEx donated the shipping!”

To participate, simply find your community by entering it into the search box on the movement's website and register for free.

Are You The Eldest In The Family? You're Likely Favored Over Your Siblings!

2008-01-03T21:02:00.000+01:00

Eldest kids in the family more often are their parents' favorites than their siblings, a study has pointed out. But if you're not the eldest, do not despair; researchers looked at beetles to arrive at this conclusion.

Even though human beings will likely profess to be against this kind of favoring, scientists say they have little choice in the matter. Why?

Biologists studying a unique species of beetle that raises and cares for its young have found that parents instinctively favour the oldest offspring.

The University of Manchester research – which will be published in Ecology this month – supports the findings of studies carried out on human families but is significant in that it suggests a wholly natural tendency towards older siblings.

“The burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides has a similar family structure to that of a human family unit in that there are two parents, a number of offspring and interactions between parents and their young,” said Dr Per Smiseth, who led the research in the University’s Faculty of Life Sciences.

“Of course human families are more complex and parent-child relationships are much more sophisticated. However, studying this beetle can help us understand the basic biological principles of how family relationships work.

“Our study looked at how the parent beetles mediate competition between different aged offspring compared to what happens when the young were left to fend for themselves and indicates that parental decisions are important in determining the outcome of competition between offspring.”

The beetles, which are native to Britain, give birth to a batch of about 20 young in the carcass of a dead animal over a period of 30 hours. The parents feed the young grubs on regurgitated flesh from the carcass.

The young beetles are able to feed themselves but they grow more quickly and become larger when fed by their parents. By generating experimental broods comprising two sets of offspring, one set of older grubs and one younger set, the scientists were able to study their development, first with the parents present and then when left to fend for themselves.

“When both sets of grubs were left to fend for themselves they grew at the same rate and matured to an equal size,” said Dr Smiseth, whose research is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and the Medical Research Council.

“However, when we allow the parents to remain with the offspring, there is clear favouritism towards the older siblings, which grow at a faster rate as they take the lion’s share of their parents’ offerings.”

The team believes there are two explanations for the behaviour: the first is that the parents attach more value to the older offspring as their maturity gives them a better chance of survival than their younger siblings.

The second explanation is that the older grubs, being stronger, are able to dominate their younger rivals and, in doing so, better attract the attention of the parents when begging for food.

“Even if this second theory is true, the parents are still complicit in the bias towards the older siblings,” said Dr Smiseth. “However, the true answer is probably some combination of the two explanations.

“The research tells us something about the relationships within families. We have this view that families are harmonious and that the overriding concern is to help one another. This is true to an extent but it’s not to say that families are not without conflict, especially if the resources cannot be divided equitably.”

Brits Crowdsource A New Flag

2008-01-01T21:00:00.000+01:00

The British are a weird people. No one wants the BBC to change its old fashioned 'This is London' news jingle ever, but now they’ve gone and voted for a new flag design. What's more surprising is that the voters seem rather unanimous in their choice.

Out of a list of twenty flags, the overwhelming vote has gone to a hyper modern looking design, sporting a sunglasses wearing flaggish type monster.

Last month, Ian Lucas, a Labour Member of Parliament, caused a storm in a teacup when he suggested the flag was in need of a change. “The Union Jack should be redesigned and combined with the Welsh flag to represent Wales's true place in the Union”, he said.

The outrage that followed did not result in any changes. Lucas was accused of being 'eccentric', but he was very serious, saying "Let the debate begin, let the rest of the world know that the iconic symbol of the United Kingdom may change and that the reason that it will change is that we have a new constitutional settlement that affords Wales its true place in the Union."

Soon afterwards, The Daily Telegraph saw it to be their task to put the question to the people. Should the flag be changed, and if so, how could Wales be represented, they asked. Within a matter of days, the paper was swamped with a list of options, some of which really were not bad.

The paper selected 20 flags for voting. The vote was put to the readers put to the people in as stiff a manner as any English, Scottish or Welsh person would expect; in three very brief paragraphs, the paper makes its proposal. It read like drawn up by naughty school boys. "We publish 20 of our favourites here. Please vote for the one you like best," is the last paragraph.

But the result was amazing; Number 14, entitled No Style turned out to be overwhelmingly popular: 55 per cent percent of the voters opted for this new design of the Union Jack. Three of the flags received zero votes, seven had one percent, three flags received 2 per cent, two had 5 per cent and one 7 per cent. There were no flags that received votes of between 7 and 55 per cent. Ten per cent of the people voting opted for none of the designs but for keeping the old one. Bizarro country. Check the flags out here.

In The Eye Of The Storm The US Government Takes To Dotting

2007-12-10T10:38:00.000+01:00

The Bush administration has systematically censored climate scientists' testimony in Congress. But censoring science is akin to challenging the gods. Natural disasters are now firmly linked to global warming in the public's opinion.

A draft report detailing multiple cases of censorship was issued last Monday by the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is headed up by Sen. Henry Waxman. It accuses the Bush administration of being "particularly active in stifling discussions" of a potential link between climate change and the intensity of hurricanes.

The report follows after a 16-month investigation into allegations of political interference with scientific research. At the heart of the controversy are the storms that ravaged over the US in 2004 and 2005 and which are by many believed to have been triggered by cyclical, global warming induced weather patterns.

The Bush administration has been coercing reporters, Waxman's committee claims. After Hurricane Katrina, those scientists who said the cyclical pattern theory is nonsense had been pushed forward. What's worse even, staff on the Senate Commerce Committee have been editing the public testimony climate scientists including that of former National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield.

"The White House exerted unusual control over the public statements of federal scientists on climate change issues," according to the report. It pointed at the Council on Environmental Quality, or CEQ, as having made 294 changes to the administration's 2003 strategic plan for its climate change science program. The changes clearly showed that the Bush administration had wanted to emphasize uncertainties and to diminish the importance of the human role in global warming, the report said.

Waxman said that science should be above the influence of politics. James Connaugton, the CEQ chairman refuted the allegations.

Anabolic Inquiries Into Bush’s Subconscious

2007-10-15T23:39:00.001+02:00

DaVid DiVizio is a Canadian artist with a penchant for originality that’s as striking as it’s unintended. Or intended. DiVizio facilitates a bizarre ability to encompass both. He has queried President Bush's words with a Personal Digital Assistent.

He’s named this device Ana and is practically married to this 'lady'.

DiVizio and Ana have performed shows in Canada, Japan, France and America. DiVizio writes words and phrases on Ana’s screen, captures them and re-processes them on a stock Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program that turns the letters into fonted print text. Ana has a vocabulary of about 100,000 words and it automatically tries to match all words and phrases that DiVizio jots down. The fun part is that if no match is available, Ana will try and interpret the word letter by letter. This is why she frequently throws out non related words, potential words or possible neologisms.

DiVizio exhibits his interactions with Ana as a developing "art of communication", as opposed to a “communication of art". He began writing backwards on Ana’s screen because his mentor, Dr. Hironobu Oikawa of Japanese Butoh renown, told him that his near name sake Leonardo DaVinci frequently wrote in backward script to make contact with another dimension. “Oikawa told me DaVinci wrote backwards to see across time. DaVinci was reading between the lines and spaces”, DiVizio says.

When DiVizio decided to try it, his first word ‘love~’ miraculously was matched to ‘ARCO warn’, a phrase that implies a temporal engagement. DiVizio was mesmerized. He stuck to the backwards method ever since because he believes time is transcended in the engagement. Now he’s processing whatever comes his way and he believes that he’s frequently unearthing a potential fourth dimension. DiVizio agreed to query Ana with a bunch of written words from the newspapers. The Washington Post provided the perfect fodder. Last Thursday, this paper reprinted extracts from a leaked transcript detailing President Bush’s private thoughts in the weeks before the US invaded Iraq. The memo was leaked to Spanish daily El Pais and it outlines what was said during a meeting in 2003 between President Bush and his Spanish counterpart then Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar.

It is a case of President Bush gloriously speaking his mind during a planning session for the final diplomatic round of negotiations at the United Nations prior to the Iraq invasion. In addition to comparing the UN’s cautions against the War on Terror with Chinese water torture, he told a jittery Aznar that if a UN majority supported the war it would be "the best solution for us" and that it "would also save us $50 billion." He also said that US troops would be “in Baghdad at the end of March." The $50 billion was the estimate at the time of what the war on Terror was going to cost, a much lower sum than the current bill, which has run up to $450 billion. The memo is brilliant material for Ana. It reveals a level of confidential information that journalists pursue all the time but seldom get. The words were not directed at the public at large, and that offers a new angle we all find terribly interesting. When words inadvertently spoken by the high and mighty are disseminated to the world, they offer the illusion of objectivity.

Where the least meaning is intended, people somehow expect to find it most. In this light, the water torture phrase is definitely the sort of material to subject to further ‘Ana-bolic’ investigation. The memo has sparked controversy, yet it remains to be seen if it reveals any useful legal grounds for impeachment. After all, Bush was talking to the Spanish Prime Minister, head of a UN member state that was totally opposed to the war, so it is very unlikely that he would have been speaking 100% truthfully. There must be way more interesting memos around than this one. Ones that involve only US government people. I am curious to find out what the thinking was on possible international law violations by the US going it alone. Issues like that must have been discussed. Ana’s interpretations of ‘inadvertently’ spoken words simply invites you to assign meaning where there’s possibly no meaning at all.

That is because the messages she comes up with appear to come from the same ‘inadvertent’ quadrants. All the same, if named, this exercise would no doubt be known as something like ‘Operation Woeful Integrity’. Or “Operation Beneath The Bush” or some such desertion. It turns out the water tortured president, proves kind of difficult to trace. But Ana’s processing of ‘George’s Water Torture’ leads to a few jumbled up words and phrases; ‘irritat retou igoogo’, ‘embat retires yeast’, ‘embat atom igoago’, ‘oratod siting Yorgoy’. For all the meaning that might be assigned to this excercise, you could say that Ana shows possibly the President’s subconscious was being attached to the military settings it at that time could have little idea about their eventual veracity. It could be a fair assumption. DiVizio, convinced there was more to it, double queried the reverse written word "torture", which Ana put out as "oratod".

When DiVizio queried the word ‘oratod?’ with the question mark in tact, Ana churned out this string; '7 Botan', '1 Baton', '7Butora', 'Rbatoso'. The numerics in the output are the result of Ana’s reading of the question mark. DiVizio says that he has encountered the word oratod recently in a completely different context too. He doesn’t immediately grasp this and resorts to another technique. “This is the poetry part”, he adds. “Ana comments, I amplify. Or better, she amplifies my mind. With the article in the back of my mind I had a sense of what to inquire about.” Reducing "Yorgoy" to the more familiar Yurgy, DiVizio’s mind resonates a kind of Anabolic language and he writes down spontaneously, in backwards, cursive handwriting "Aweright Yurgy. Half it yure way then." Ana does not recognize some of the words and presents "Aweigh Yurgy. Half it you wag then". DiVizio has seen more spectacular outcomes, he says. “It would be so nice if I could get her to present that much precision out of my simply writing backwards. Sometimes she's syntactical, but that's exceptional”, he says. DiVizio adds that the stochastic part of the process is what is so addictive to him. His Ana investigations are not scientific. If that were the case, he says he’d have become a gazillionaire by now. Some of DiVizio’s other ‘exploits’ are no less than mouthwatering.

The story of his reading Umberto Eco´s book Foucoult’s Pendulum perhaps best typifies just how DiVizio ‘relates’ to Ana on a day to day basis. “I was in Montreal for a performance festival, and found a hard copy [of Foucault’s Pendulum] in a used book store. I bought it, having never heard of it before, but knowing that Eco´s the third in the trilogy of Saussure/Pearce/Eco Linguistics/Semiotics”, DiVizio remembers. “I was travelling by bus when I started to read it. On page 2, Eco writes of Fantasy and Fantastic places. The names Samoa and Avalon appear in two lines, one above the other. Both of those names were stochastically generated by Ana in the weeks leading up to my reading them in Eco's book”, he says. He started querying Ana by processing mirror readable script from that point. Soon she churned out the words Mona Lisa. “When I looked up, the businessman sitting directly in front of me had the Globe and Mail spread open and held up before him a full page image of the Mona Lisa! Now that was exhilarating.” The event inspired him to publish Ana’s readings of Foucault’s Pendulum. Soon he had accumulated 350 files in which Ana processed unknown vocabulary. “Let me say, I didn't read it in your usual way. My reading or the Pendulum was like reading it from the inside out”, he says. He published Ana’s ‘Pendulum readings’ files online on one of his many blogs: http://anafoucault.blogspot.com/. He’s also on YouTube, where he's uploaded a video showing him in action.

Bad Breath? Buy A Mobile Phone With A Halitosis Meter!

2007-10-13T11:51:00.002+02:00

Mobile telephones that come with pedometers and pulse meters have been around for long, but A Japanese mobile phone company has finally added a new feature to its handsets that could potentially be really useful; a halitosis meter.

Imagine walking to your next appointment, oblivious of that one glass of beer's let's say radiation. Halitosis is the difficult word for bad breath but you don't need to worry about language when you're in possession of a Mitsubishi mobile telephone which comes with a 'wellness navigator'. The phone was launched recently at the Ceatec 2007 exhibition and its inventors are none other than Japan's NTT DoCoMo.

The phone measures your breath and alerts you when it's time to use that mouth spray, just about the only feature that has not been inbuilt in the device. Aside from the halitosis meter, the DoCoMo invention also has features that keep you informed of your pulse and your paunch, thanks to a built-in pedometer. The device analyzes your body fat too.

The phone is most valuable when a user has customized it completely. You can set your personal excercise goals, send yourself your health data and track whatever you eat by clicking on pictures of typical meals. The handset will tell you when it is about time you got yourself a good night's rest, take some excercise or what you should be eating.

Sound too good to be true? Totally agree. Even the company itself has difficulties sharing its invention, it appears. DoCoMo sort of treats its invention as a secret best kept. They won't tell anyone how to purchase this item. Or how much it will come at. The company's spokeswoman Makiko Furuta was [url=http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19569/ t=_blank]quoted[/url] by Technology Review as saying that "the target market is flabby middle-aged businessmen and diet-conscious young women".

Perhaps the sloppy marketing of this device made in heaven underscores why Japanese phones generally do not make it to the top percentiles of popular phones in the US. Many Japanese phones come with similar features except a halitosis meter and few are in use in the US, which is definitely a health obsessed market.

Reading just how extensive the analysis of bad breath, or exhalation, is in a clinical sense, makes you wonder just how effective the device might be.

Technology Review defines bad breath as 'a complex bouquet of gases, mostly sulfides, which a spouse--or a very good friend--can subjectively evaluate with a sniff'. But it adds that 'Objective assessment is harder'. Apparently, something called a 'gas chromatograph' assesses a chemical composition of breath, or exhalations, but they they're expensive and require trained operators, Technology Review says.

The mobile phone makes use of a so called sulfide monitor. These are generally in use in clinics but a complaint is that they require recalibration very often and sometimes skip to define a particular exhalation as halitosis.

O well, it might provide another false sense of security that could be potentially hilarious or just down right disgusting.

What Are Jules Verne’s Books Doing In Space?

2007-10-12T23:15:00.001+02:00

Finally it’s happening for real. Jules Verne’s books are about to be literally sent into the future. The European Space Agency (ESA) is sending three of his works to it space station ISS.

Space agency ESA is sending two original copies of Jules Verne’s works about space in sealed plastic bags to its ISS space station, as well as a 19th century luxerious edition of his book From Earth To The Moon.

Incidentally, Verne wrote this book exactly 100 years before humans first launched moon exploration trips. The story is quite prophetic of what is currently being undertaken by ESA’s work; members of the American Canon Club think of a way to send a projectile to the moon. A French member, called Michel Ardan, says he’ll crawl inside the bullet to travel to space.

ESA’s current space mission dubbed Jules Verne is underway full swing in Turin. “The space ship is not a bullet, but the very first Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) which transports 180 kilos of freight, including spare parts for the European Space lab Columbus”, says Dutch newspaper De Dag.

The paper brands the books ‘pr literature’. It makes you wonder whether this is a stunt or whether the space explorers really believe that they will find readers?

Whatever the reason for taking the books on the trip, the astronauts have promised to make sure they return safely to earth by the time they finalize their work on the ISS station. The works are the property of the library of the French town Armiens Metrople, the little city where good ole Jules hailed from.

Short Story - The Hare and the Tortoise

2006-05-28T23:38:00.001+02:00

Once upon a time, there was a forest with around three hundred animals in it. They did not know any better than that they were called the Alcanoiles, after the mountains of their home forest, which was in the Mustervla regions.This is the story of how the spiders tried to take over the forest's control of the Lions by spinning magical webs.

Until the very first spider emerged some four hundred years ago from a raindrop and set about making a beautiful web from the raindrop to the middle of a lake, the forest had been like any other forest. A nice, slightly enchanted collection of trees with leaves, surrounded by a stretch of sand leading to mountains of which the forest inhabitants believed they were a perfect ending to the world. They looked at the skies with silent trepidation except for nights because then the skies volunteered them what the sea offers to human beings in summer. The wind and the leaves were laboring together to provide a thing that you and I might know as humid air, but that the Alcanoiles knew better about.

They called the air around them Humdrum. To the animals Humdrum set the tone and created the feeling in the free air against which every animal could make an exact pitch of sound, wing flapping, hoof pacing or step knowing that where they would land next would be another enchanted, and therefore, safe spot. All animals believed that Humdrum must go on forever if they were to live long and happy lives. Humdrum was simply the most important thing to be aware of, here, now and all the time, they told each other. Until the arrival of the very first spider in Alcanoiles, Humdrum really was nothing beside the sound of the wind and the leaves.

Perhaps in ages longer ago, the forest had been alive amid a different noise, but no one was quite sure what the animals before them had been pitching their endeavors against. At any rate, the sound of the spider that arrived first and that had managed to make it alive for over eleven days and nights all on her own, was seen to be the novelty of the century by all animals, even though none of them knew what a century actually was. Rather than the constant ruuussshhhs swuuusch of the wind and the leaves, the spider's enchantment sounded more diverse and melodic. Although I know better than to try to capture sounds into words, the spider's sound leant itself to words surprisingly easily. Had you and I had animal's ears, it would have been something like cling clang pong ping. This distinct sound was unheard in the forest. All animals found that the combined effort of the wind and leaves were useful for assuring safe passage of the simple things in life, but that the wind compared to the spider's clings very vaguely, almost as a disguise. No, the cling clang was the real Humdrum for this day and age, everyone believed, and the owls used to say that by tilting your head, you could find your way around even with your eyes closed. So it was decided the spider should not be eaten, in case the sound would disappear and leave the forest void of its effect.

TWO

In the year that followed, the first spider had become the proud mother of five new spiderlets and together they had started to attune the forest as if they had nothing better to do. Soon they realised that besides singing the entire day, from time to time, they'd have to create different, less clingy webs, to catch a fly. These webs were not meant to produce sounds because the other animals would find it difficult to think they were safe amid the screams of dying flies. So the spiders always made sure the webs for giving the forest its atmosphere would be made of the best quality silk, almost of metallic threads. They lasted longer and would be making the most pertinent noise. "A metallic thread leaves them clear in the head," mother spider told her young ones. Until the arrival of the first spider and probably until her little ones had grown up, Alcanoiles beasts and animals had been mostly very nice to each other, apart from the ones that ate other animals of course and only bees, horseflies and musquitos were hated by the Alcanoiles because they were known to administer other animals unknown quantities of stings for no reason whatsoever. Of course a tiger was not exactly friends with a sheep and neither was a sheep kind to the leaves on trees or grass for that matter. Smaller animals would generally ignore big animals, even if they were not eaten by them. Lions ruled the forest and their rule was mostly believed to be fair and unobtrusive. No one ever questioned it, Lions were not hated by anyone.

A few animals really loved the lions, but only those that had enough time to themselves not doing jobs for the lions. Among them were the tigers, the elephants, some bears and most all the giraffes. Like in any other reasonable forest, if something big happened, it would be the owls that'd go round the forest to bring other animals the tiding. They had a very official way of doing this and ended each time with 'so I hear the land lies'. This meant that they could never be exactly sure, but that most of what they had been reporting would be true, or, they thought that way it would be understood. Trees grew and so long as new leaves kept appearing once a year and made Humdrum sound roughly the same as the year hence, every animal knew he was not anywhere he should not be.

Their mothers and fathers had told them, as they themselves had been told by their own parents, never to set foot where they could see plain sky. "Keep close to the trees and gras and when the light is so strong that you will have to blink your eyes more than five times, you're in danger of making the great fall that no one returns from," every animal was told as soon as they could walk.

The story of the Hare and the Tortoise was told as a warning so often that it was every animal's nightmare, except Durry the eagle's. His sole ambition in life it was to make a symphony in Humdrumese because he believed the language contained direct links to forest outer space.

Durry had not done anything in his life but playing until the day that he thought he was no longer just playing. They had not been great games. Throwing sticks, making waterways in mud puddles, forcing slugs to race each other by threatening to confiscate their houses and finding out how many prayers he'd have to say before he'd catch and eat a rabbit again after letting it go, not much else.

Durry never 'had', he just 'was' and this was just about as much as he thought he was. In this, he was no different from most animals in the forest. Durry thought he had good reason to become fluent in Humdrumese. Why is it, he had asked his mother many times, that every time the light forces me to blink my eyes more then three times, I seem to see the mountains take as many steps back and make way for more grass? Each time he asked this question, he actually had meant to ask ‘Why is it that each time I blink my eyes more than three times, I can't remember what I actually meant to ask’? Durry did not know many things, but he had asked so many questions that had been driven by his longing for the sandy space outside the forest, or forest outer space, that by now he had begun to think that outer space might not be there.

"I really must probe mother some more, I am sure she's in the know," he said to himself. It had been the effect, every time he asked his mother the Big question, or, as he chuckled to himself, every time 'he did the eye blinking thing', that made him doubt more and more that Humdrum really ceased after the last tree in the forest, like the spiders made them think. But each time, she had thrown an instant fit so powerful it made him believe she also thought that in reality no boundary ever existed and she was forced by some jerk to shut up about it.

The fits had been so brief however, that afterwards, he doubted he'd really heard what he'd heard. After the trembling, shivering and gasps for breath had worn out, and she would have rearranged her feathers Durry's mother begged her son never but then never to act on his life ambition, not even to speak of it ever again. He had trouble thinking what his mother had said when she threw one such fit, so frightened he had been when they happened. Only after the third occasion had he mustered up enough experience to actually rembember some of the words.

They'd been in rhyme. He recalled this one line clearly. "It will flex us all perplex," she had screamed. The mother eagle had thrown this line only just about from under the top leaves of one of the tallest trees, for Durry, a wicked little eagle he was, had picked this spot to practise his theory of forest outer life on her. Durry inspected it carefully and thought it was pretty cool stuff.

That evening, Durry's father, grandfather, grandmother and around six of his ten aunts and uncles were called in to make sure Durry once more would be brought to understand that their and therefore his forest stretched as far as only the strongest bird could fly and return. Nice troop reinforcements, Durry thought. "That is it boy, and no further nonsense, you're upsetting us all", he was told. "Show some respect". And though he thought it uncanny he agreed to listen to everyone's vivid descriptions of their own personal farthest tree, although he wondered why it really was so necessary if he needed to be convinced that the edge of the forest was really too far for him to see for himself the so awful grey stone.

Every story ended with 'had I gone any further, I would not have been sitting here today'. "Too bad", Durry thought in most cases, although he took care not to rhyme the unspoken replies in case they would hem them all in.

THREE

Durry, despite the many warnings he had heard the night before, decided now was the time to be totally reckless. No one would be suspecting him immediately of more boundary exploration activity so soon after a rebuke.

So, as soon as the next day came around, Durry woke up early. He fluttered around somewhat around the tree he usually slept in and waited for hhis sister to wake up. She was up early too, because she was an early bird. Durry fluttered around some more and then casually threw one rhyme to his sister.

"O dear harpsicord, why don't you plonk your ass over here and have a beer," he tried. The effect of that totally innocent pun was explosive; his sister, it appeared, was flung into the air, with a force other than her own frail wings. She shot up in a matter of split seconds, higher than the tree they had been sat in. The spider webs that were covering the leaves were ripped apart and Durry’s sister was virtually unconscious when she landed back.

In a sense, that was lucky, because Durry did not immediately know what to do and his next line "I believe you're growing a beard", was almost equally disastrous. His sister had begun to shout loudly and she shot off in the air again. This time below the foliage of the tree and she got stuck in spiders’ webs, once again nearly unconscious.

Durry found himself unable to shake off the rhyme and in his head was making up scores more. ‘I am not chosey but don’t want you to appear’ was one he remembered afterwards. The other rhymes escaped his mind soon after he thought them up. Nevertheless he thought he was doing real magic stuff.

"Jeez, if just some nonsense yields this effects, what will happen if I get to the real thing," he said to himself, wondering what it would be like. He was convinced though that the real thing would land him in forest outer space. Perhaps the world outside the mountains would open up finally if he had an idea about the right words. But for now, his sister was still stuck in the tree top covered with spiders’ webs. The general Humdrum cling clangs were quite unbalanced, but since Durry had been thinking very hard about rhymes, he had not noticed any earlier than now. It was most important to first get his sister down at this moment. Durry began to try to reverse the wheel he'd set in motion by thinking up a few simple rhymes. But even "A pun is fun" would not help out. "My feathers have turned into a sticky mess. Perhaps I will never be able to fly again, dumb sod, Mom is going to kill you," his sister complained. She had regained all consciousness that was for sure.

Durry realised that it was very important that he got his sister free as soon as possible because otherwise he’d be in some real trouble, despite his newfound sorcerer’s status. His sister opened her mouth again to start screaming again, but then they both saw something neither of them had seen before; his sister’s reflection was very vivid and sharp in the spider webs. The webs that spiders created were invisible, yet the light behind them shone through, and Durry’s sister was reflected near perfectly.

The spiders always made sure that whenever a web got tangled up too much or gathered dust, they’d quickly eat them and spin neat lines again because they did not want the other animals to see the webs. It was the secret to the enchantment.

You and I know there are clowds above the trees, but Durry and his sister didnt know this. When they saw Durry’s sister’s reflection (only she was close enough to the sticky web to be reflected) they were spooked out of their wits. Durry did the first thing that came to his mind. "O for crying out loud, do not shout!, he screamed, fearing another shouting sister would be impossible for him to cope with. And to his relief, not only was his sister completely dumbfounded, she instantaneously was disentangled and fell down the branch like a stone. Twenty yards below, she finally regained her wing capacity and flew to the nearest branch. Durry was beside her immediately. ‘Woah”, he said. He didn’t know what else to say. He was frightened what his sister’s next actions were going to be. But Durry’s sister was pretty cool for once. That was because she’d seen herself for the very first time. So she said ‘not bad, you made my day, bro’.

And flew off. Durry was happy as a bee in a bonnet. Not because he had made hhis sister’s day, of course, but because ONE she wasn’t going to land him in trouble and TWO because she would understand his idea of the outer forest, he was sure of it. A very unlikely candidate for believing in him, but as his father would say welcome to the world of sales; the oddest people surprise you from time to time. The world wouldn’t be the same without them.

"Right, that's that", he sighed, and flapping his wings back into place which was difficult because particles of the sticky web his sister had escaped from had landed on his feathers. Being a lazy sod, he gave up his real life, mechanical, effort and turned to magic once more to sort this problem. He hastened to say "I will be you until you stumble too." Durry didn’t even know where his sister was at that time, but it must have been quite okay, because he'd safely landed in another tree before he knew it.

Durry felt a sorcerer of mega proportions. He said to himself that he had two fool proof spells now, even though he only meant to try out one. OK, so to escape the effect of an unwanted rhyme, you’ll simply have to create an impression you know what you are doing and opt for the next rhyme that comes up in your head. And stick it in a context of a great undertaking.

You say one or two magic new words and the lines practically weave themselves,he told himself.
It is the recipe to see, he hummed happily jumping into what would be the third or fourth layer toward forest outer space, by his calculations. He wanted to go there to see if he could get by without blinking his eyes at all. When his sister had been up in the tree, he had realised that he’d manage to blink only twice, but that might have been because of her reflection. He wasn’t sure. Those bird uncles and aunts that had flown to the edges of the forest and had made it back, had told him that what came next were mountains so high and steep they were unable to fly over them or find a resting place somewhere half way. Spider webs don't stick there, and that was something, because in the Alcanoiles, spiders were known to produce most sticky fabric, the first spider having stuck its lines succesfully from one watery substance to another. But Durry, by shouting that he’d be trading placeswith his sister, had unwittingly created an explosive situation for himself, his sister and the entire forest actually.

Durry felt jubilant because he was convinced that he could say a few good rhymes that would easily land him in outer space that would still be safe. It would only be a matter of finding the right words for outer space, he said. “Was it only last night that I asked my aunties and uncles whether they really thought that our forest ends when the stupid, silent mountains rise up?,"Durry asked himself. He had asked his aunts and uncles whether they really believed all animals were simply trapped in a place with nowhere to go outside its boundaries because there's no Humdrum for that territory. Durry had even asked one raven uncle who had returned and told others about the grey blue mountains of which the tops were obscured by clouds. "It was the impression that I got," the raven said when Durry asked him thhe question. Durry had thought the raven was sad, although he did not show it. That afternoon, Durry did the thing that mixed up all the time frames in this story. He began to frolick around in rhymes with reckless abandon without realising that his sister was doing exactly the same thing!

Lifting his wings and flapping them about heavily, he set out rhyming.
Instantly, the low forest buzz turn into a more rhythmic sound. Real Magic way. The next thing that manifested itself was a bird dropping something in a spot that Durry saw turn magic just ahead of the dung's landing on the forest's moss carpet.

"Wherever there is motion as a result of my rhymes, the world has already become enchanted before the other animals move," he thought. “I am doing it for them!” But again, he was not sure he was not imagining things. He was not even sure it was him that was doing it. Then Durry, because of his confusion and his recklessness, did the thing that did all spiders in for at least the next four millennia and which made Humdrum the language of the dead. He had run out of ideas for rhymes and began to recite poetry he had learnt when in the third grade and created a short circuit because his sister was reciting those exact lines at one, brief but o so fatal moment.

What happened is that his sister and he landed on the same spot and the web lines lost their elasticity and snapped.Durry had just tried to repair the damage when his line about the egg and the chicken sounded simultaneously with the one about the hare and the tortoise. In an instant, the entire forest started to tremble right until the edges and it did not stop there; the sand where no one had trod, started to ripple too. Clouds of dust were soon obscuring the sky. The birds were very confused about their bandwidth as they alluded to their skies that day.

But guess what: The moving lines reached the mountains, yes the mountains! The grey rock however bounced off echoes that resounded through the frail spider webs for days in a row. Poor Durry had set off one motion too much for the spiders. By the time the tremblings had stopped, all spiders had been eaten. Or so every animal in the forest believed. In reality, the spiders had quickly hidden in underground networks that they had taken over from the moles. The moles, being blind had given the very first spider the idea to take over control of the forest. The day that Durry’s little accident happened, the very last mole died. It was a mass murder of mega proportions that went by totally unnoticed. The spiders, for years had been blocking the system by simply spinning thick webs over all entrances and exits of mole holes. The moles were not able to see the thick spider webs because they were blind. Spiders knew that the same principle would work outside too. “So long as we keep the lines neatly separated, the other animals won’t see our webs. They will be magic and we’ll produce magical sounds along the strings’, the spiders decided.

At first, when Durry’s accident happened, everybody had thought the world was at an end because the day had turned into a night. Durry did not say a word, because he thought, his sister might have said he had been behind this hocus pocus that had turned the forest upside down. But luckily that was not the case. All animals were busy trying to find their nests and families without the aid of Humdrum and the hype prevented that anyone should think of him. Each animal shouted in their own voice -the sheep bleated, the horses hinniked, the cows moaned, dogs were barking and wolves howling. Soon the constant zooming of leaves in the wind and the spider plongs were forgotten.

Durry, for the rest of his living days had nightmares of mountains falling on him almost every week. He never spoke a rhymed word again in his life, even though he could have easily done so, because rhymes had lost their power, since all spider webs were no longer being maintained by an active spider population. The animals were a bit surprised to find that the forest had become so spaceous since the departure of HUMDRUM, but they soon stopped wondering about why this was and lived their happy lives listening to the wind and the leaves again for safe guidance.

FOUR
It would take years, no, what am I saying, decades, o no, millennia or maybe centuries further into the forest, for one wise owl, he said his name was probably Dougal, or that that was how he heard the land had been lying at the time of his birth, to accidentally come across Humdrum again. It went something like this. Dougal, let's just skip this nonsense about how the land is lying, we can by now safely assume it is his name, had the task of bringing news to the spiders of the forest. He was a bit stretched, to tell you the truth, because since one spider had given birth to a group of umpteen replicas of herself, soon after the Durry incident, the number of spiders in the forest had been rising rapidly. They spun invisible webs both in the molehills and in the forest, but none of them had started to creating humdrum again because they wanted the other animals in the forest to think that they had all been eaten, in case anyone found out what they’d been doing to the moles. So they went about their business quietly.

So when Dougal the owl came across a spider in front of a sparrow’s house, one afternoon, he was not really sure what kind of creature he had the pleasure of meeting. What was more, the creature wasn’t altogether all that nice. The spider stood on a ridge of a tree branch when the owl flew past him. It challenged Dougal. "Say, Dougal the owl", the spider snarled, "the Sparrow bird ain’t in, but I bet you your news is what a horse tail told me yesterday. Now if you come again be sure to bring real news or otherwise skip by this abode.”

Dougal wasn’t exactly easily impressed but this was knocking him off his socks, for sure. Never in his life had he been so taken aback. Owls were considered wise creatures and hardly anyone would ever try to compete with them. But the spider had no qualms about it at all. He noticed Dougal’s defeat and was encouraged to go on some more. “I tell you, horse tails have it that the hare's no longer a hare and the tortoise is no longer a tortoise in a day or two. Now beat me to that one’, he said.

Dougal the owl smiled by clacking his beak twice, as he always did to spiders, and said "Oh my, a new wise ass in the neigbourhood. Where’s your nose, so you can put on my glasses?”, he said, taking them off. And then, putting them back on again he said; o you have none- well I guess the deal’s off then. We’ll see in two days who’s the better party. Ciou.Dougal would never be impolite because he generally was too wise to be rude. But there also was another reason why he held back. This was because his mother had raised him to always be good to eight legged creatures, because, she said, 'you never know what'll wind up next'. He did not know what that meant and had never had time to look it up, but he knew that his mother was right. He was not sure why this was, because he found his head filled with all sorts of words he’d not looked up ever yet. Our friend Dougal, without knowing it, was close to reinventing HUMDRUM once again.

Alas, he only realised this when it was too late, after he had in vain tried to remember what the spider had been on about at the end of the day, and found that he could not recall the exact words but instead had heard a sound he'd never heard until then. It could have been both the clinging sound of a spider on his web, but somehow he thought it was too loud for that. It was more like his big sister's harpsicord. Like Durry, Dougal also had a sister who played the harpsicord. The events that followed were to be the news the owl would be shouting round the forest that next day normally. But they were not. Because the events that unrolled became the forest's revolution of the century which needed no broadcasting via invisible webs, because every animal of the forest gathered there to witness for themselves. At this point, the spider webs had become defunct mostly. In many areas in the forest, thick throngs of spiders webs were beginning to clutter up. The spiders realised that if they ever wanted to really take control of the forest, now was a decisive point.

They’d have to be moving quick to restore their magical webs once again, they decided. So that is why the rowdy spider installed himself in front of the Sparrow’s door. Knowing that the Sparrow would not be home he could easily intercept the Owl on his news round. This is how the spiders this time around made sure they convinced everyone in the forest of their magic. They conducted a stunt that every animal witnessed for themselves.

It involved a tortoise that had become trapped in old spider webs so thick he could not wrestle free. The ordeal was taking place at the edge of the forest, the spider told the Owl. It was a very precarious matter because the only way out for the tortoise would be to step into the sand dunes that separated the forest from the mountains. And there were no trees there.

The spider’s trick to get everybody to the spot was to tell a lie. He said that a hare was going to race the tortoise to the mountains. Dougal the owl, rather than checking out for himself whether this was true, simply told everybody the news.

And that is how the entire forest population gathered at the edge of the forest within no time. What they found there was only the trapped tortoise. The hare was not there. But everybody that arrived at the spot believed that the hare already had set off.

The tortoise, aghast at the spider’s lies, tried to tell the animals that no race was on but that he simply had become trapped in some sticky stuff. Having been stuck for long however, the shelled creature soon was totally out of energy. It could barely lift his head and unwittingly proclaimed a magic spell. "Why should I trod where you plot!!???," he sighed exhaustedly, before resting his head on the brim of his shield again.

These might have been the words to an ancient rhyme invented by the first Alcanoiles spiders. Instantly, sand started to sprout up around the tortoise, pushing up his shell and lifting his legs. You see, up till then, the tortoise, about the slowest animal of the forest, had never set foot outside the tracks of any of the other forest animals. But this time, no one ever had been where the tortoise set foot after his ‘swan song’. Not only did the tortoise set step outside other animals' footprints, but he landed totally effortlessly into the vast stretches of sand of outer forest space where he'd have to blink his eyes at least until the death. And so, as the other animals looked on in horror, the tortoise carefully trod deadman's land. The onlookers were not sure they understood it, but what they saw was to them at once strange yet familiar, although no one could tell exactly why. On the one hand, they were all utterly bewildered at the sea of light that surrounded the tortoise, yet they saw him disappear. Eaten by flashes.

No one spoke, but all knew the air around them carried the message – don’t go there. An age old spel was either being cast or broken right before their eyes. In the meantime, the tortoise was just pacing himself and making sure he did not forget which foot to set next in the strangely moving sands. To him, whatever he was doing, wherever he was going, was the most natural thing to do. He turned around and said : hey guys, this trodding and plodding is pretty besotting.

The animals were spooked out of their wits, hearing the voice of a deceased. Some wanted to follow the tortoise. “If the afterlife is so much fun, I want to go as well”, one young crow said. But his father pecked him in the eyes. Just in case the little sod has plans, he said. Can’t you see the spiders are messing with us?

One hare did it, however. He had not been able to find his brother and was convinced that he had raced the tortoise. Thinking that life had become meaningless to him, the hare, making sure no one noticed, zoomed into the sand, after the tortoise. "Quicksand", he thought the next split second. After that, we don’t know what happened to him. The spiders never even noticed him, and his brother – was found later, also trapped in some old, defunct very sticky spider webs not far from the edge of the forest.

The tortoise was going very fast because the spiders were throwing up sand from the underground tunnels under every step he took. They had prepared the track for ages and everything worked according to their plan. The tortoise had a the sensation that he was flying. Never in his life had he gone along at such dizzying speed. “Can that be?", the tortoise wondered excitedly. "Am I a hare?," he shouted to the animals that were still in the forest. But they misheard him. They thought he shouted "Am I there". They all became very sad and hung their heads. The tortoise traversed the sands to the mountains in five minutes sharp. It was a world record.

The tortoise thought that he'd slowed down, because the flying sensation in his muscles had gone, but as a matter of fact, the sand had begun to rise even before he set his foot because the spiders in all this chaos could not keep track with his enthusiast rhythm. This he regretted and, having been what to him had felt like flying, he wanted to do it again. Straight away!

Perhaps he had not looked back but he also had certainly not looked in front of him, so he stupidly did not see he had actually finished crossing the plains and was setting out to climb the mountain. "Let's just widen the space of my footsteps again”, he said. “What do I do? O yes," and he remembered. But the creature in his effort to 'fly' again would have either crashed straight into the mountain or rather have dropped off the cliffs -and this is the scary part of this story- because the tortoise really decided to hurry some more, not realising that what he actually was experiencing were the steps of a hare pacing himself whilst decending down a winding mountain path at the end of a long hike up a mountain... And where were the spiders?

All

his

head...

the difference between being and not being / border and no borders

2005-07-14T12:49:00.000+02:00

There's so much you can write about today's events and whether a repetition might be soon at hand, but one first of course needs to condemn the dreadful London attacks and only then is it decent to start to speculate. But is condemnation not simply what brings us back to the reality that is so dreadful? We need to be forward looking, don't we? Anyone straying us from this path ought to also be condemned.

We think that we should not use bad words when real people are involved. The ever ongoing talk in this office about abstract versus real issues is now by far not decided. We have made some progress toward agreeing that we all are on the brink of either progressing real fast into some new spearheaded reality or of falling way back by addressing issues in a down to earth way that's signalling a similar misunderstanding at an intersection a few decades ago. What do we think about authority in all this? The words Out on a limp might gain another meaning yet again. Lessee what's happening.

Throughout the course of this blog, we have learnt a number of things, and one is that repetition is rather easily achieved in the realm of our minds and the train of our thoughts sometimes perhaps just goes round in annoying cirles that might become smaller rather than bigger. So the last time we actually employed the term self dilating assholes is somewhat unwise a link to make and this on all fronts, both tangible, intangible, in our fantasies and our minds and not to forget our hearts. Somehow the young kittens that no longer are a lovely litter but are studying with great interest their own litter tray do come in conspicuously handy in today's what will likely unwind as a plethora of analogies.

That's perhaps why we'll play it safe this time. We are also very busy compiling all those traffic rakers of articles of course AND work is being done on the more permanent side of the TRAINSPOTTER we launched this morning.

Three years ago, some protestors at the WTO negotiations in Seattle summed up the general feeling here quite well. Marching into the space that humans normally leave blanc and taking to the streets to demand fair trade. The end is interesting too: "I am not your fucking enemy", one protester shouts to some law enforcement officer trying to impose some kind of boundary. (listen to the mp3)Which is where the party is of course totally self justified and a heck of a lot of fun... The second piece of information on this issue is a repetition in this blog of the German professor Ulrich Beck's ideas. The difference between borders - no borders and being there - disappearing to him is possibly what Shakespeare talked about, but not really. Anyway, it is interesting, the kind of logic that makes you turn squares turn into circles, which turn into balls. On a roll, in other words. Still I find it difficult to believe that this is really all that modern. But judge for yourself.
¶ 3:06 PM

angry hearts angry minds, make my day!

2005-07-08T16:51:00.000+02:00

African Roulette.
The World would not be the same place without Africa as the West's poor cousin. That counts for both our world and the bleak reality further afield, in differing proportions, sadly. Today, we had a massive row in the office about the horrors that the West is now bestowing on this continent versus the wonders big Western business can work. Our clients leave us a 'flexible breathing space', as one referred to the 'do as you like so long as you make us look good' brief they gave us when they outsourced their web content to us.

In the end we all agreed that the -quite astounding- British proposal on Africa topping the agenda G8 meeting this July is likely going to be a non-issue anyway. If you examine the track record of unfulfilled promises of previous G8 meetings when it comes to the third world, you'll see why.

What's -sadly- likely most interesting of all however is how the anti globalization movement comes out of the Gleneagles scene. Many global issues have changed during the last three years, mainly as a result of the war against terror, and there's an inherent confusion on all fronts of the political spectrum. Yet for all this 'coming off age' of the left and right and middle ground politics, it's not working out a lot in terms of issues that are really tangible, like Third World poverty and crime rates. Anyone who's some anti globalization proponent is likely to be wanting to be motivated in their actions on this front, which is severely underexposed in most official political manifestos.

We all agreed on this: we hope the drive is toward greater coherence on anarchic systems. There's no room for government in our world. Everyone who fails to see this is blind. These facts underpin this: the Africa deal on the table designates a limited debt forgiveness of Africa's Heavily Indebted Poor Countries.This means that only 15 countries are likely going to benefit from the deal, which is very unlikely to come off anyway. If the developed world were in any way serious about its pledges made in the so called Millennium Development Goals, it would come up with a list of at least 62 low-income countries that need total debt cancellation. The -self imposed- goals, which are spelt out on http://ddp-ext.worldbank.org/ext/MDG/homePages.do, were signed by 189 governments include reducing the proportion of people living in poverty by at last half between 1990 and 2015.

We churned out a hitter on the issue on a number of websites with this 3,000 word article: Africa's Debt And The G8 Gleneagles Meeting. (read on the contentclix.com site: here)

And me, I am just a doll. Thank god.

That nasty instrument called The Pen

2005-06-04T11:47:00.000+02:00

Today´s a day, conspicuously appropriate for wind and rain.
Like yesterday was a day for birds and bees. We are at war with god possibly.

There's a multitude of things happening in the wider world that represents less rosy circumstances for the five of us, who are feeling a little crammed out in this office overlooking the Amsterdam canals nevertheless. I feel like writing a long story about a chubby and no doubt chubbier growing French woman who's been having an intense speed course in English for five weeks and asks the teacher after week four has come to an end what the meaning of the word 'I' is. `What´s, eeeehh, how do you say it... i, I, i´? That´s how foul things can get apparently. And that is somewhat the feeling here right now.

Since I started telling you the tale I might as well finish it too. Perhaps this is an excuse to get out of work, but here goes;

Rather than flailing his arms, the teacher does his job and checks out what she´s missed out on. After going through five weeks´ worth of lessons, he realises that she hasn´t really missed all that much vital information. There are not many texts that feature the first person which do not necessarily concern personal matters. And when we write about ourselves, the word does often not feature as much in the text as other words describing ourselves. Also, most lengthy written communication is unwhittingly understood to be one author talking. We all have written texts and know the exercise inside out. Nobody need tell us that written material normally entails one person´s view. It is usually the texts that we write for ourselves, communicating with our selves, that feature the word I most. In this sense, I is about the best word the French woman could have missed. Who knows, perhaps she was a genius for asking its meaning, because she might have picked it up from a line that was rather more communicative than the other lines in the book.

I find it scary to think that most of our writings are largely skipping the details of the perpetrators of the crimes. What does that say about us. Are we prone to devious communications continuously, as we are skip-hopping the I´s? Are we frightened we might not be deemed funny enough? In need of hiding other ugliness? Condemned for being domineering? Whatever the motivations, striking a cord apparently can be done without our direct involvement. Which is to say we are perhaps employ totally deamonic methods, putting pen to paper. Might it be something to do with the instrument? Has the pen taken over the person? It is a suspicious shape, competing, and no doubt feeling victorious when it does its dotting tricks, mean thing. In the 14th Century, or earlier, there will have been some people as vehemently against the instrument as people are against abortion now. Imagine the condemnation if you were a step up and combined pen and looking glass. Boy would you be conducting insanely suspicious behavior in the bare and often barren, myopic eyes of the inquisition on your doorstep. Later on, having gone through many more stages involving studies of the effects of communication-by-means-of, people came to pretty much similar conclusions, in a rounder than roundabout way. No longer was the pen instantly accused of killing off the I in texts, it is technology that now´s on trial for suspectedly killing off humans in all their be all and end all selves. Forget about Is altogether. By now, we don´t feature anywhere on a personal I front. And the children and grandchildren of the pen (not pencils, by the way) finish off the job. Whether we like it or not.

2005-05-11T10:43:00.000+02:00

I am an expert at developing blind spots
it's something I do for entertainment.

It’s a kind of syndrome, borne out of repetition, my therapist keeps telling me.

I wonder if I’ve spread the bug to him too.

But I won’t ask.

Just in case I have and he keeps repeating I have.

Recently, I developed the most unique kind [of spot].

One that blocks my self.

I asked everyone around me if they’d seen it too.

And they said: yes!

It was the ultimate in terms of shock value.

“YOU KNOW HOW IT HAPPENED?”, I asked them.

They said: “You asked.”

I did????

(I wonder how many times have gone by in this fashion without my noticing.)

Weird stuff happens all the time, but blind spots becoming visible is rather impossible, wouldn’t you agree?

Perhaps I should be making a cartoon out of this.

But then, I might have made one yesterday.

Or just seen one somewhere.

The blind spot business is overly rational, come to think of it.

Anarchy - People Power and what it can effect

2005-05-06T00:10:00.000+02:00

Just how much some people are united in the feeling that government is really rather an anachronysm, is reflected by this entry into the samisdata.net website or blog.

A major research institution has just announced the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element has been named ‘’Governmentium’.
Governmentium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.
Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact.
A minute amount of Governmentium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete, when it would normally take less than a second.
Governmentium has a normal half-life of four years; it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganisation in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.
In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each re-organisation will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.
This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as ‘Critical Morass’.
When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element which radiates just as much energy, since it has 1/2 as many peons but twice as many morons.

Just to illustrate my point about just how ill tempered people are getting. Is it my perception only - am I looking out for these things and thus am only seeing them? I don't think so.

Here's an article that I wrote today, outlining just about where contentClix.com is. (We suck bad).

Is Independent News Reporting As A Profession On Its Way Out?

A few years ago, I worked for a specialist Africa news publishing house and encountered for the first time in my journalistic career the phenomenon of publishing expert articles written by non-journalists.

The idea of making a publication the centerpiece of a number of institutions that have interests in knowing what their competitors were thinking, doing and who they were talking to was quite new to me.

But it was an interesting experience, which set the scene for later developments in my career. For once, I was not trying my hardest at finding stories, angles and wrangling myself in godknows what positions to get to the hot stuff – here were people offering news that was by dint of them volunteering it in the knowledge that their competitors were doing the same, way hotter than anything I as an outsider could have begun to report.

Creating this platform and taking a step back by more or less editing only, changed the idea of journalism from being objective news reporting, to letting everyone run as much riot as they liked, in fact encouraging the weirdest of views to be published uneditorialised.

The publication was more in need of streamlining editorially than of active reporting as a result of this formula. And the readers tended to read everything a-z because they got what they wanted; sensitive competitive information.

Today’s debate about the validity of journalism, now that news intake is perceptibly more dominated by pieces written by non-journalists, reminds me of the deliberations I pondered at the time.

Are people right to say that journalists have less of a role now and should just forget about their pretenses and claims to a largely people dominated Fourth Pillar when it comes to news these days? Any good human interest feature is basically revealing people’s emotions and thought patterns. Read a blog and it’s thrown at you by the shuvvle load. That’s not to speak of the way more valuable insights on politics, arts and life in general that you find in the blogosphere.

What’s become of a journalist’s task to report on what’s alive in the wider society? Is it really simply being overtaken by the masses themselves? Could you argue that the task of a journalist to inform, comment and divert has now become somewhat defunct?

Let’s examine just how true this is by subjecting the media industry and the blogosphere to a few number crunching exercises. I will then tell you how my adventure with the African news organisation ended. If you can’t wait, jump to the conclusion.

First, let’s see if journalistic articles are really losing ground to the ‘free sector’ articles.

Second, let’s see if newspapers have less impact on the public debate.

Third, let’s see how journalists respond and if they stand a chance of coming out on top in the competition for information provision.

First- It’s not all bad news for the publishing industry. Apparently, in the US, there are scores of newspapers that manage to actually increase their readership.The Newspaper Association of America says that 3 in 10 papers have increased their circulation. The percentage of the population that actually reads a news paper on a weekday has shown a decline, from 58.6 in 1998 to 52.8 percent in 2004, yet this is offset by the fact that more people share newspapers and this highlights that it is likely that not only is the decline due to economics, the fact that people actually make an effort to grab their copy shows they’re truly into their papers. The numbers by themselves however don’t really mean anything, unless you put them in context and compare them with what’s been happening in other industries, age group by age group. According other figures by the NAA, (which researches the $55 billion newspaper industry and more than 2,000 newspapers in the U.S. and Canada, just a nice market to prove the point), among 18- to 34-year-olds in the top 50 markets, 68.8 percent or 31 million are reading the newspaper over the course of the week, compared to 70.5 in spring 2004. Only 36.7 percent of all adults in those same markets watch an average half hour of prime-time television in a given day, compared to 38.2 in spring 2004. This is a bigger decline. 21. 4 percent of adults listen to radio morning drive in an average quarter hour, compared to 21.7 percent last spring. Also worse.

This tells us more or less that the newspaper industry isn’t easily defeated. Circulation might go down, but at the same time, newspapers are the only industry that can get away with charging for content online and it’s very likely that the decline in numbers is going to be made up from revenues made through clever online deals.

Second- Numerous online polls show that people do read blogs and alternative media outlets, but that they still more or less will return to their standard newspaper for guidance on issues. Journalists that have reached celebrity status continue to arise. That’s another indicator that this industry is down but by no means out. In terms of sheer money, newspapers and established media it is evident that the established media do still have a profound impact. They are about the only industry that can charge for paid content without people objecting, an enviable position that apparently newcomers have a hard time mimicking.

Jupiter Research quotes prevailing consumer resistance—over two-thirds of online adults remain unwilling to pay for additional content or services (65 percent and 75 percent, respectively)—as the main problem for content providers to make handsome profits. These are advised to execute strategic and cost-efficient marketing plans in stead of charging for their service. If people are willing to pay for newspaper articles whilst they refuse to pay for content from other providers, this means that the newspaper industry is believed to add some kind of value that people do not think others do. If that isn’t impact, I don’t know what is.
Third- The response by those news organisations that are ‘making’ it has been to professionalise, outcompete. The media industry has for decades been under fire from all sides, because information provision has long been a capital intensive exercise that is not necessarily very lucrative.

Many ventures are either sponsored by governments that value a pluralistic press or have had to adopt tough business structures to survive. Reuters, one of the eldest news wires in the world, has always been at the forefront of new technology and was among the first agency to realise that devoting funds to business reporting would salvage the rest of it operations, a model swiftly followed by other outlets and which also led to imitations all over the globe. If its current stategy is anything near as savvy, it means that getting the news first is still a simple but elementary guideline to success.

During the latest US elections, Reuters during the last US elections showed an old leopard don’t lose its spots, when it teamed up with Zogby Internaitonal, the agency which during the preceding elections won itself good fame and a handsome fortune in being on the money through some real good polling. It even assigned 50 journalists to work with the company to get to the grassroots. Undoubtedly this will have made them so much more informed than their competitors and certainly than any old blogger. There is a myriad of examples here. Ground rule is that market principles don’t necessarily create destruction, but when exploited right, will create interesting sub markets.

Conclusion:
Reality is multi layered. It always has been but we now have way better means to see it. And by witnessing the layers in their context, our response, just like it always been, is to inflate our part in them. By doing so, we create a new layer. Darwin would turn in his grave if he knew.

The publishing profession is not exempt from having to undergo change. In order to actually get through to your target market you need to get clout and clout only materialises when other people agree that your content is worth reading and linking to. By the time that any given outlet reaches a critical mass and has created vibrant hubs, it will be hard not to become more ‘publishing oriented’ – so much street cred, fame and love- even if only for the advertisement revenues.

Perhaps an organisation that’s gone through this process will understand better why writers and journalists defend their self appropriated (journalism is a free profession) turf and assign themselves Fourth Pillar powers that they don’t want others to infringe on, but which give them the prerogative to subject their surroundings to critical assessment continuously. In this, they simply continue to reflect the wider society. The publishing trade has changed perhaps over the last years, but that’s simply integrated into better and more evolved structures. Now it’s all about labeling things right and being a tad less confused than others.

I still owe you the ending of the African venture. After two blissful years, it was snapped up by a consultancy, which employed a sizeable staff of international analysts who used to read Reuters reports all day long and subjected the news topics to more analysis, combined them with their own insights, and then happily sold the edified product on to specialist groups for huge sums of money. Layer creation of the first order. I don’t know what happened to them, but I bet you, they have been snapped up since.

2005-05-02T17:56:00.000+02:00

Visible remnants of the world’s eldest democracy can be found in a town in Carantania, where during the early Middle Ages, this tribal society of some kind of Slavic people managed to live for over 100 years without being invaded and invented out of sheer happiness a vibrant people’s power concept. They did not call it democracy but the word invented later was directly taken from their example.

The Carantanians, situated in the the Eastern Alps (present-day Austria), arose after the decline of the Roman Empire in 476 in territory of the Roman province of Inner Noricum.

They had a pretty elaborate procedure whereby the people elected a Duke who ruled them in such an utterly romantic way it's unbelievable. I'd like to start the next line with 'For all intents and purposes', simply because it can't be lacking from a piece on tribal societies, which often inspire the best of cartoons too, but somehow the line's amiss here;
The Duke ruled only by consent of the people. They could do away with him if they so pleased. (Don't work there either).
His rule was also not passed on to his offspring, but every time a new Duke needed to be found, he was put forward by popular choice in its purest form. The Carantanians were an incredibly proud people. They were not shy about showing him off either and even invented an entire ritual event around his installation. This took place in the open air, at a huge stone, was said to be among the greatest ceremonies ever witnessed even by high ranking outsiders.

In matter of fact, it is due to a pope that the system received free advertising around the world and became a known concept to later political theorists who were experimenting in drawing up similar ideas. The Carantanian example was described in glowing terms by Pope Piccolomini (II) and apart from their fame being spread all over Europe, they also were noticed by people further afield, including the US President Thomas Jefferson a few millennia later when he studied the words Jean Bodin wrote about them as examplary material for the US constitution.

Writers making note of them furthermore included M.A. C. Sabellicus (Eneades Rapsodiae Historicae, Opera Omnia, Basel 1560) and P. Mexia (Silva de Varia Lezion, Seville 1570).

It is not only the political theorists who are said to have found inspiration in Carantania, which pretty much showed it was possible for a people to live relatively peaceful together without an overt autocratic ruler –something that was pretty much the standard elsewhere, where rulers brutally enslaved the people they ruled- but the installation ceremony around the stone has proven very similar to ideas throughout Europe regarding the ceremonial installations of kings and rulers.

The most famous of them is the coronation stone that’s found in England, the fabled yellow sandstone ‘stone of Scone’ (named after the Scottish monastery where the stone originally was found) which in 1296 was placed under the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey, is nevertheless inspiring. It is associated with the crowning of all historic Scottish Kings and its older name is indicative of almost religious sentiment, ‘stone of Destiny’, or ‘Liag Fáil’ in Scottish Gaelic. Its transfer from Scotland to England was to be the symbol that the kings of England would be crowned as kings of Scotland also.

Ironically, after the initial fame that the Carantanians enjoyed in the international world, their story later was pretty much hidden, because of the political situation, and political repression. Or so they say. Even more ironically, that might make the story all the more topical now...

The stone and the origins of the ceremony are the subject of scholarly research and there's a nice example of scholarly infighting over just how right or just how wrong some people participating in the research are. One twat is denouncing people's findings who claim that a particular branch of Slav people have lived for a very long time in the area of Carantania and around it, whilst someone else is saying the people claiming this could be right.

To make this into an example of just how silly people can become scholarly undemocratic when even researching a topic that could not be more intrinsic democratic than this is something that is tempting. It is also tempting to actually research claims by people that the stone here was used for similar purposes as other stones in Europe on which kings and queens were installed.

Some people say that the stone in the Westminster Abbey was actually the very same stone that Jacob in the Bible rested his head on and that was apparently dragged around by Moses for about fourty years. I initially shy away from these theories, but then there is a lot of speculation too about the stories of the origins of the Slavs indicating that humanity's origins can be traced back all the way to Adam and Eve believe it or not. (inclusive of the predecessors of indo europeans, which appear to have been african europeans)

There is no real clarity around the stone that is conclusive, yet it's got all the great makings, including the Celts as well and some evidence that even the very name of the country of Spain originates in the languages of this area, with people having lived all over the place still visible in their names, you name it it's here.

Even the fact that traces of the presence of linden-trees, which was considered the tree of life of the ancient Veneti (the much contested Slav people in question), are found in the arms of the Guipuzkoa province, is an ulterior indication of the one-time settlement of this people in Spain, in the pre-Celtic period. The same name of Spain, in origin Spane (pl.), meaning the characteristic Spanish plains, seems to be referred to the Veneti.

To close this entry today, marvel with me in the way the installation ceremony was conducted:
The installation of the duke takes place on a hill named Krnski grad (Karnburg) in Carinthia. There, close to the church of St. Peter, is a meadow with the so-called Prince`s Stone.The new duke, accompanied with the banner of the country, surrounded by nobles and knights, walks up to the hill. With one hand he leads a spotted bull and with the other, a black and white war horse. He puts aside his precious vestments, and then they dress him in a gray coat and gird him with a red belt from which hangs a big red hunting bag, such as it is suitable for the master of the hunts. Into it he has to put cheese, bread and other food. They give him a hunting horn firmly bound with red straps. Besides this, they put two shoes wrapped with red thongs on his feet. They wrap him in a gray cloak and then place on his head a gray Slovenian hat with a gray cord.A free peasant mounts the prince`s Stone. This office belongs to him by right of succession and is hereditary in his family. The duke carries in his hand a stick and comes forward. Alongside him are walking the Count Palatine, the landgrave, and other nobles.
•
The peasant sitting on the Stone proclaims in Slovene language: „Who is he that comes forward?"
•
And those sitting around him answer: „He is the prince of the land."
•
After this, he asks: „Is he an upright judge seeking the well-being of the country, is he freeborn and deserving? Is he a foster and defender of the Christian faith?"
•
All answer: „He is and he will be."
•
The peasant then asks: „By what right can he displace me from this my seat?"
•
The people reply: „He will pay you sixty denari, and he will give you your home free and without tribute." Whereupon the peasant, after giving the duke a gentle stroke on his cheek, proffers him the place. The duke mounts on the Stone and, drawing his sward, turns in all directions in order to show that he will be a righteous judge to all. And it is narrated that the duke then takes a drink of cold water out of a rustic hat, so that the people, seeing this, may not crave for wine, but may be content with what the native soil produces to sustain life.Finally, they lift him onto a horse and conduct him around the Stone three times. At the same time all of them sing their Slovenian Kirie-Eleison, praising God, because they have been given a new ruler in accordance with His will.

Imagine what splendour that must have been!

Anarchy (IX) - Economics input (don't mind the bad mood)

2005-05-01T17:44:00.000+02:00

Human beings are quite capable of ‘knowing’ certain things without necessarily having read up on them is a dangerous presupposition to start today’s entry with, yet there’s plenty evidence all round that supports this, including human centered economics and nano technology.

So if the immediate truth isn’t obvious to you, just gamble a bit and soon you’ll be addicted to your own deepest understandings... Gambling is what modern science boils down to most of the time anyway. It is amazing how little agreement there is in the major sciences on topics of major importance and how everyone just banters on nevertheless.

It’s economics today and I am feeling dangerous already... Still, the area might provide the most topical ideas on how to achieve things like distribution of power that’s fair. How much power governments have, how much power corporations have and how much there’s left for you and I. Are the consumers really the determinants in the economic society? Are the capitalist businessmen? There’s as little agreement on this issue among the economists as there is on whether reality is determined or not by logic among the scientists.

Every time I open an economics ‘work’ (it’s always a ‘work’ or a goddamn ‘treatise’), I am surprised at how mostly every economist thinks they need to start out on very elemental things and put them right in order to get the rest of their (immoral?) gamblings on track. Most capitalists still pit their ideas against the socialist and Marxist idea of labor and wages and it is to some extent refreshing to see how the domaine of the real and tangible helps people to think they can win the argument by showing either how the pre-capitalist society did or did not include a proper arguable case highlighting exploitation.

A welcome deviation after the airy fairy scientists who rather refer their unsolvable questions to the metaphysical domain or even say they don’t know whether the questions themselves are even justified.

Without a proper idea of who controls what in the area that ties us all together in a most levelling way, economics, you can hardly begin to get a knowledgeable understanding of any futurist models that societies evolve their economies around.

When the economist George Reisman says it’s the capitalists that determine the course of the capitalist economy, he attributes a lot of power to the people who posses capital. He justifies this, like many other free market thinkers, by slamming the door on the leftists in a way that’s infuriating, I find. He argues that the pre-capitalist society simply was not able to produce wages, that it only produced profits and that wages are the product of the capitalist society. Fair enough, but then he goes on to say that the economic system could never have come about had it not been for the capitalists.

In a 1000-page book he even contests that a pre-capitalist economy as such ever existed, yet he stipulates that there had once been merely workers producing and selling their products, the money which they receive in the sale of their products would not have been wages. "Demand for commodities," to quote John Stuart Mill, "is not demand for labour." In buying commodities, one does not pay wages, and in selling commodities, one does not receive wages.

No effort is poured into questioning this setup at all. Rather, Reisman thinks the classical economists need proving right. I wonder why. He says that because in the pre-capitalist economy, all income recipients in the process of production are workers. And that given that there would not have been a hierarchal structure, the incomes of those workers would have been profits, and not wages. On this basis he argues that when someone buys a product, they don’t pay for the labor involved. To actually hire oneself out one would make the fatal mistake of not being able for ages and ages to be making a profit again, eg return to one’s roots? Get to a similar standing in society as the big boys on merit alone? In my view, he argues the Marx case totally, especially when he says: “Wages are not the primary form of income in production. Profits are. In order for wages to exist in production, it is first necessary that there be capitalists. The emergence of capitalists does not bring into existence the phenomenon of profit. Profit exists prior to their emergence. The emergence of capitalists brings into existence the phenomena of wages and money costs of production.”

And then he goes on to argue that when you buy a loaf of bread you don’t pay for the flour you only pay for the bread. To add insult after injury!!!

Oh well. In setting out, I thought I would be able to live with the principle of capitalism by now, but this to me is a bit too distasteful still. I don’t think that it is a matter of misunderstanding.

But let's not be defeated immediately. Perhaps focusing on theories that put the consumer in the center of the universe is less repulsive. What I find interesting about free market principles is that in theory everything gets levelled out around supply and demand. It is somehow quite a nice mechanism.

I need to research some more whether the above has shown us that once the territory has been taken (capitalised on), there’s hardly a way in which the ensuing structures are going to be up for a review. Of course the free market principle acts as a kind of system which is not good for everyone, yet it does not disallow everyone from betterment either. Where's the consensus here these days?

The logical path to the other end of the spectrum would be to say that a free market economy is somewhat in need of government intervention if it is to protect people from each other’s greed. Yet since I am in favor of gambling today, let’s jump to the other end of the spectrum immediately and forego all the boring bullshit and include the comments by someone who believes that it’s not necessarily true that governments protect us any better than the free market would.

Yes, a total laissser faire proponent:

The point that all economists routinely visit ‘just what is the level of anarchy in any given economic political system?’ is well worth exploring some more, because it opens up the area of our research project considerably and also shows what factors are deemed of importance and where they overlap with other schools of thought. Mr Alfred G. Cuzan, Department of Government of the New Mexican State University sure knows his rights from his lefts. Cuzan argues that in essence all government as we know is of course anarchic at the government level. Because who is watching the watchers, or better put: who is ruling our rulers? The ruling class itself is totally anarchic. Of course, he says, some structures are in place to ensure no real abuses of power take place, yet when you think about it, the people in government are not ruled themselves in the areas they govern. I find this a bit cheaty, but okay. The rest of his argument is what interests me with regard to the economic escapades I am making. Here’s a libertarian who’s putting forward the libertarian dream to the very limit. Doing away with government, he says, is more safe than keeping it.

You always think that libertarian economists aren’t really serious, but think again! In Cuzan’s theory, there is what he calls the ‘third view’ in all government ruled societies, which he equates with situations in which the relation between government (the substitution of political for market anarchy) and violence. The third view gets stronger when the structure of the government, measured along a centralization dimension is stronger. “The more authoritative powers are dispersed among numerous political units, the more pluralistic the government. The more centralized the structure, i.e., the more authoritative powers are concentrated, the more hierarchical the government. [...] the more hierarchical the government, the more government is run on the assumption of an ultimate arbiter. In other words, the more centralized the structure, the greater the effort to creale a single "third party" inside the government itself in the form of a God-like figure such as a Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Castro. Such a "third party," however, remains in complete anarchy from the rest of his countrymen and the rest of the world”, Cuzan says.

The more plural the politics of a country, the more the rulers behave without any reference to a "third party" and thus the more society resembles natural anarchy. The less plural or more hierarchical the politics of a country, the more society appears to be ruled by a truly "external" element, a God-like figure sent from the heavens of history, religion or ideology.

This reads like the sort of material we have been looking for!!! And it's gotta be said, the libertarian school is these days seen as quite advanced compared to other economic ideas. Cuzan's research shows that anarchic principles can be found in both communist and capitalist societies yet they have less chance of ever ruling countries with strongly centralised, thus autocratic rule.

In passing, Cuzan gives us a great foundation for justification of anarchic principles that points conveniently toward our hunch that the less government you can do with is the healthiest form of society because it relieves a society of the mistakes made by its rulers. When mistakes are made by people in power, they tend to be more destructive than when they are made by people who are not in power. Any reduction of power throughout the bank is advisable, because the more powerful the person in power is the greater the magnitude of the error will be AND the more likely he is to make mistakes. When power is decentralised, more people decide on issues before they are implemented, thus less chances of mistakes being made.

This is how Cuzan describes the dangers of political anarchy in highly centralised systems in countries around the world:

"But why would the degree of centralization determine whether political anarchy is violent in hierarchical states such as China or Cuba, and relatively peaceful in pluralist states such as India and Costa Rica? The answer may be simply in the fact that centralized states are more likely to make mistakes than decentralized states.5 Political mistakes are in the form of wrong or false conceptions about the nature of bilateral relations in society and in politics, such as conceptions held about the relation between worker and capitalist in communist states. If judgments are wrong, they are not voluntarily accepted by one or both of the parties to the transactions. Under those conditions, the only way for the rulers to enforce their "third party" conceptions is to use force, which, under different conditions, will or will not be resisted by the opposition. In a pluralist government, wrong conceptions about bilateral relations in society are less likely to occur. This is because there are numerous units independently interacting with each other and with the citizens and subjects, so that more and better information about the effect of these judgments on bilateral relations exist. Moreover, wrong conceptions are more easily checked as various autonomous political units, each capable of marshalling political resources of their own, confront each other in a successive series of political transactions. In contrast, violence is lowest in societies with highly pluralistic politics, such as Switzerland. This is true even in the "communist" world: the more pluralistic communist politics of Poland or Yugoslavia are less violent than the more hierarchical politics of the Soviet Union.”

The alternative, according to this economist, is of course market anarchy. Citing history, he argues that pluralist, decentralized political anarchy is less violent than hierarchical political anarchy.

"Hence, we have reason to hypothesize that market anarchy could be less violent than political anarchy. Since market anarchy can be shown to outperform political anarchy in efficiency and equity in all other respects,' why should we expect anything different now? Wouldn't we be justified to expect that market anarchy produces less violence in the enforcement of property rights than political anarchy? After all, the market is the best economizer of all-wouldn't it also economize on violence better than government does, too?"

The way Anarchic societies stacked together (II) - and the French NON

2005-05-01T10:31:00.000+02:00

Many of the problems that the members of the European Union are expressing with their constitution are in matter of fact problems with they perceive to be the ‘one size fits all’ idea of policies. The French are loudest in expressing their objections and looking at the history of the evolution of the nation state, perhaps they have a point. It took millennia for the idea of the Nation State to evolve into any recognizable shape. So to expect a huge bloc of countries to continue to integrate without noticeable hiccups would be naive.

The idea of the modern state as it can still be seen in Europe and the US was in matter of fact invented by a Frenchman. Political philosopher Jean Bodin in his 1576 book Six Livres de la Republique describes a republic as "a just government of several households and of what they hold in common, with the power of sovereignty". His description and further treatment of the subject confirms the great importance the concept ‘authority’ and ‘sovereign rule’ has had in our formative ideas of statehood. Bodin is a very contradicting scholar. He is said to have been both the proponent of an overly powerful ruling class –absolute monarchy- as well as an advocate for limiting the power of this sovereign to the doorstep of every household.

He was the first to hit home the notion of sovereignty as a limited entity when he at the time of writing referred to mostly feudal and monarchic systems elsewhere in the world as simply horrific. Slave master relations in countries like Russia, Turkey and Iran at the time abhorred the Europeans. These countries had a sovereign who was more or less full master of the "bodies and goods" of his subjects. The people of Europe would have not put up with such a regime that took for granted certain limits to the state's authority, according to Bodin. On the other hand, Bodin was accused of being a proponent of unlimited rule. True enough, Bodin extolled in extravagant terms the prerogatives of sovereignty; but these did not include the power to impose new taxes. ‘Natural law’ forbade this, he said.
Bodin cites Seneca to the effect that “to Kings appertains the power over all, but property belongs to individuals". Bodin is said to have been very impressed with Europe’s eldest form of democracy, embodied in the ancient democratic ceremony of the Carantanians (currently in Austria), which he said "had no parallel throughout the world." And perhaps he was right; The Slovene community in Carantania was one of the few at the time to not have slaves. Stretching from the river Elbe to the Adriatic Sea, its centre was at Gosposvetsko Polje near Krnski Grad which is in present-day Austrian Carinthia.

The free Carantania became infamous for resisting all foreign domination for almost one hundred years, which in this area of tribal Europe was also quite impressive. Besides leaving a lasting imprint on the historical memory, their example has inspired European countries to date as well as the US, where Thomas Jefferson took inspiration from reading about it in the Six Livres in his constitutional work. The Carantanians’ celebratory democratic institution, the installation of a Slovene duke persisted down to the year 1414 was quite a remarkable piece of culture even at the time. It took place during a general assembly of all free Carantanian Slavs, by voting. A duke would be installed with at a place called Knezji Kamen (the Prince's Stone) with special rites by a peasant, the embodiment of the people, on whose behalf he invested the duke with power and authority. Just imagine the scene.
The prince had to make a solemn pledge in public to be fair and just at all times, to defend Carantania bravely against all enemies, to do everything possible to safeguard peace, and to help the poor. The ceremony at the time was quite unique and attracted the attention of the humanist Aeneas Piccolomini, Pope Pius II, who travelled through Slovene lands, to say that the installation ceremony "was second to none."

This Robin Hood type democracy is known to have flourished centuries before the adoption of the Magna Carta in 1215, which is widely regarded as the cornerstone of contemporary western democracies.

This is not to say that Bodin advocated the Carantanian ideas, yet he was convinced though that human structures as they had formed did show that they were quite detached from the balance of nature. Primitive tribal democracies of the Carantanian time might not at all have been compatible either with the statehood that Bodin describes. “In order to function as viable members of a medieval polity, states had to possess permanent social structures. First of all, a state had to be identified with a definite geographical space, a stretch of land whose physical features could 'imprint themselves on the collective psyche'. Such a rooting in a particular territory could not be brought about except by centralized political power which could define the territory’s limits and organize their defense. This demanded, in turn, the development of a social hierarchy in which a ruler and a class of nobles shared the burdens of power and were able to interact with their social counterparts in other states. The definition of spheres of authority and the stabilization of administrative practices called for the adoption of definite legal procedures for whose formulation a supratribal literary language was needed,” describes Alexander M. Schenker, a Yale University scholar in his ‘An introduction to Slavic Philology”

He then goes on to illustrate that the void here was filled up by the literate clergy. Those days, the church pretty much assumed political powers as a natural extension to its religious teachings. Bodin, who lived at the time that Huguenots and Catholics were involved in religious strife, advocated more secular, professionalised political rule that superseded church domination.

“Cadres of learned, or at least literate, people had to be developed in order to use this language in the course of performing the necessary administrative functions. Hence the need for Christianity with its monastic tradition of learning, with its schools where Latin or Church Slavonic were taught, with its ability to replace tribal particularism with its own universalist message. To initiate a social revolution of these dimensions, strong leadership and permanent political institutions had to emerge,” Schenker writes. It took some European countries millennia before the favorable conditions for the establishment of a nation state arose with a central element here often the opposition of pagans toward ruling by a clergy elite.

Bodin's thinking on political issues was quite similar to that of thinkers of his generation, including Montaigne, Pasquier and Le Roy. These thinkers, like Bodin no longer believed that human laws and society very closely reflected the immutable principles of the divine and natural orders, but instead argued that human affairs were generally detached from these orders and were characterized by a high degree of particularity, variability and mutability. However, Bodin did say that the human political order could not subsist without some divine and natural foundation. His works are attempts to identify a new universal foundation for human laws and society, anchored in the divine and natural orders and are highly regarded in their pioneering the nation state until today.

Bodin’s treatment of the nation state appears to be motivated by his perception that the limitations of power needed to be made clear. In arguing the case for absolute monarchy, he did speak out against abusive taxation policies in outside countries, but underlined the need for a well ordered society which did away with the remaining remnants of feudalism. He saw France’s defense as neccessitating collective payment of soldiers to defend the country against a Spanish army, which was financed by silver from the New World. (This was the first standing army since the Romans' more than a thousand years earlier.)

Incidentally, this was also the occasion on which France established a mercenary economy; it started to create revenues by keeping imports low while pushing exports and subsidizing them. Few political thinkers have been regarded to be at once as innovative and as self- contradictory as Jean Bodin, a statement that would not be totally out of line describing Europe of today. A number of his ideas were developed in the seventeenth century, in Germany, the Netherlands and England. They either reconciled apparent contradictions within his thought or exploited their ambiguity for political advantage.

It took 300 years--the time until the unification of Germany and Italy in the 19th century--before Bodin's description of the nation-state came to dominate Europe. But his mercantilism was adopted almost immediately by every European government, large or small. It remained the reigning philosophy until Adam Smith showed the absurdity of believing (as mercantilism does) that a nation can get rich by robbing its neighbors.

Yet twenty-five years after Smith, mercantilism was still the doctrine that underlay America's first and most important work in political theory; The Report on Manufacturers (1791) by Alexander Hamilton. And almost a century later, in the second half of the 19th century, Bismarck based the new German Empire on Bodin's mercantilism as adapted to Europe by Hamilton's great German admirer, Friedrich List, in his 1841 book, The National System of Political Economy. However discredited as economic theory, mercantilism, not Adam Smith's free trade, thus became the policy and practice of governments virtually everywhere (except for one century in the UK).

The Spanish, predictably, never took a liking to Bodin. Their Counter-Reformation ideas disparaged Bodin as a politico, second only to Machiavelli in his alleged advocacy of the subordination of religion to political ends. By contrast, Italy during its Counter-Reformation heydays, did adopt some of his ideas but thinkers in this country had difficulties with his theory of sovereignty. But Bodin has left his strongest imprint on politics in France. Hence, some political commentators regret today’s Non in France and say that the French for all the reasons they may have to do away with the European ideals they themselves are among the strongest proponents for, is simply a denial of their own origins. “A continental Constitution that ensures basic human rights and dignities seems to be as much a French legacy as anyone else’s. [...] we are awash in examples of people who lightly toss off their hard- earned heritage”, writes Dawn Miller, an editorial writer of WVGazette, after spending 11 days in a Parisian neighborhood.

Others have issued warnings of doom if the technocrats of Brussels continue to ride roughshod over the clearly expressed aspirations of member states referring to recent challenges to democratic ideals that are steeped in plenty historic precedent. “There have been enough hints by the electorates of various member states in a sufficiently large number of national elections to give Brussels a sense of what needs to be done. Each time, election results that have reflected the rise of populist, anti-EU parties (such as occurred in France’s last Presidential election) have been dismissed as one-off aberrations”, writes Marshall Auerback in his international perspective on Prudentbear.com He says that as a consequence, the underlying political message is ignored and that this is storing up more trouble for the future. That is why we already see a vacuum in Brussel which is likely to only get more extensive as time goes along and no change is made in the Commission’s operating procedures.

The way anarchic societies stacked together - the Slavs

2005-04-30T19:00:00.000+02:00

This is a historical account of a pre nation-state society that was highly successful because it had found a form to live together that was quite in balance with nature. Just revel:

“Poland is in the northern part of Slavdom. In the east its neighbor is Rus’, in the south Hungary, in the southwest Moravia and Bohemia, in the west Denmark and Saxony. From the side of the North Sea [the Baltic] . . . it has three very savage neighboring peoples of barbarian pagans, namely Selentia, Pomerania, and Prussia.87 . . . The land of the Slavs, which in the north is divided into or consists of such different countries, stretches from the Sarmatians . . . to
Denmark and Saxony; from Thrace through Hungary . . . and further on through Carantania it reaches Bavaria. Finally in the south, along the Mediterranean Sea beginning from Epirus through Dalmatia, Croatia, and Istria, it reaches the shore of the Adriatic Sea where Venice and Aquileia are situated and borders there with Italy. . . . Although this land is heavily wooded, it abounds in gold and silver, bread and meat, fish and honey. It is to be preferred over other [lands] because, even though it is surrounded by so many of the above-mentioned Christian and pagan peoples and was attacked by them many times jointly or singly, it has never been completely subjugated. A land where the air is healthy, the fields are fertile, the
forests are flowing with honey, the waters are full of fish, the warriors are pugnacious, the peasants are hard-working, the horses are tough, the oxen are ready to till the land, the cows have plenty of milk, the sheep have plenty of wool. (Anonymous Gallus, 9–10) Ibrahim Ibn Jaqub (1.41) speaks equally highly of the natural riches of Poland but adds a note of practicality to his account of Mieszko’s reign: As for the land of M.T.ka [Mieszko], it is the most spacious of the [Slavs’] lands and it has an abundance of food, meat, honey, and arable land. His taxes are set according to the weight of merchandise and they go for the pay of his men. Every month every one of them receives a fixed sum. He has three thousand armored men divided into units and every hundred of them is equal to ten hundred others. And he gives these men their clothes, horses, armor, and everything they need. If to one of them a child is born, he orders that it be paid a [soldier’s] pay from the moment it was born, whether the child is of male or female sex. When the child grows up, then, if it is a man, he will marry him off and will pay a dowry for him to the [bride’s] father. If it is a girl, then he will give her in marriage and will pay a dowry for her to the [groom’s] father. . . . If some man has two or three daughters, then this is the cause of his wealth. If he has two sons, then this is the cause of his poverty."

This is taken from the writings by a Benedictine monk, which are considered the earliest local source on Polish history. His is a chronicle compiled in the beginning of the twelfth century. His chronicle gives an account of the earliest Polish history from the legendary beginnings of the Piast dynasty, through the rule of Mieszko and his son Boles]aw the Brave (992–1025), leading up to the times of King Boles]aw III Wrymouth (1102–1138), Known as the Chronicle of Anonymous Gallus, it is, like its contemporary Czech chronicle of Cosmas, couched in highly literate, versified Latin.

Anarchy (VIII) Anarchy rules, but where?

2005-04-29T12:08:00.000+02:00

Anarchism as such is a hard sell on par with the EU constitution perhaps. Any chances for a country to be ruled by alternative rule will in future likely always remain zero because -as many economists, philosophers and scientists claim- the way reality interrelates is determined by forces we won’t in a billion years have any chance of controling. That is not to say that an anarchic systems might necessarily not be better than the best democracy on earth.

An anarchist with aspirations to help build organizational structures not based on government from above’s best bet is to get a clear picture of those areas of science that are leading the way in terms of future progress. In setting out to get any broad idea of what's driving our society’s progress, the sciences open up a plethora of ideas for alternative ways governing reality. It is simply surprising what limited bearings these abundant ideas have on real life governments, business and any organised part of public life, given the fact that many of them have been around for so long.

Talk of the anarchization of structures that govern us is not new, yet it’s likely that we’ve become immune to it. To think anarchy has so far always boiled down to getting a pretty close idea of existing governing principles more than what they can be replaced with. Our tolerance levels for more general new ideas have also risen a lot due to the rise of technology. So much so that we hardly are knocked over if someone supposes that doing away with governments altogether might suit us even better than the adoption of another government imposed procedure based on true wisdom whether or not scientifically correct.

Neither are alternative theories very much still seen as subversive. Anyone with a subversive streak simply has to start shouting or display very odd behavior and will still likely fail to be recognized as such. Even though naturally we sidestep systems that do not testify of authority from above as having any chance of being implemented, so long as you don't package the subject with blatant 'anti establishment' labels, you have equal chances of getting as good a hearing as the man who's proposing the next major overhaul of the national health system or so. So in this sense, the anarchy project is really rather simple. Compile ideas at random and start preaching them.

Yet the fact that none of us can imagine what a country is going to look like that's done away with government, combined with the fact that organising this is a real possibility is somehow again highly indicative again of the state of play in the developed world. It's the anomaly of the ‘Third World vs Developed World’ type. Poverty can't be simply reasoned away. We know that. But we’re less sure about subversives. Why? Because we don’t know, that's why!

The shift in nature in the debate from the real and tangible to a higher, almost metaphysical level, is something that many old time revolutionaries objected to but which modern anarchists simply take into their stride. The abstractization of reality somehow is objectionable when it comes to real life threatening situations like poverty in Africa and terrorist attacks on our cities, yet most anarchists, like the mainstream, see the fact that terrorists have forced us to take this portion of reality at face value not as a reason to abandon this domaine. To do so would be to abandon all options to make a difference they argue.

Political realities no longer are dialectical, but rather a viral ooze, infecting language and thought. The search for alternative ways governing reality is underway full swing and it it’s taking place without our knowledge in governments, business and any organised part of public life.

Depending on one’s take on the subject, it is not so much the viability of chance that any given country will by choice adopt a system based on anarchy that is sought, but the ideas surrounding this. Man’s ultimate strife is to master nature in a fully free and autonomous way.
To gain any insight of where alternative ideas have a chance to find a solid base on par with the ideas that are currently employed by governments, one simply needs to take a look at what’s the hottest topic in the philosophy of science. The arguments here likely shed most light on how we are likely to think about the future in coming years.

The talk in the philosophy of science is yielding an overwhelming plethora range of ideas for our argument and almost serves as a microcosm for the rest of the world. Number one; there is not and not by far enough information to find decisive answers as to whether there’ll ever be a theory that conclusively decides whether reality is deterministic - ie ruled by logic. The debate was hot when nano technology sprang to the fore a few years ago and carved out a whole new dimension for itself.

The epistemology of determinism is a thorny and multi-faceted issue. It brings out the issues that the wider society has been dealing with intensely since the 1970s. Both proponents of determinism and their opposition, the 'pluralists', boast incessant streams of prominent examples. "One would think that it should be at least a clearly decidable question", according to Carl Hoefer in an article "Causal Determinism", which is due for publication in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in the Summer of 2005. But further reading teaches you soon that to expect any outcome in the battle between determinists and pluralists is not realistic.

The debate, which to some extent has been ongoing for almost as long as humans have been around, was first highly topical for a brief moment at the turn of the previous century in the more restricted area of mathematics. What's become known as the 'Russell Paradox' knocked the mathematical community off its feet. It gave rise to more experimental mathematics than any of the generally lazy formula makers had expected, who thought they were making progress in denoting reality this way, had been reckoning with. The Russel paradox points out that until then, the mathematicians had held false pretenses as to the ramifications of their field. The paradox in simple terms amounts to the following question about sets (a collection of objects that can be defined as a rule).

He wondered whether it was possible to create a set out of sets defined as not members. Russell wondered if that particular set contains itself and this way formulated the first paradox in mathematics. He argued that there are only two possible answers to the question of whether a set made up of sets not part of themselves can actually be part of itself. If the answer is yes, then set A does contain itself. But if set A contains itself, then, according to its definition, set A would not belong to set A, and thus it does not belong to itself. Since the assumption that A contains itself leads to a contradiction, it must be wrong.

If the answer is no, then set A does not contain itself. But again, according to the defining condition, if A does not belong to itself, then it would belong to set A. We have contradictory propositions that imply one another. The assumption of no yields yes, which yields no, and so on apparently.

To still see this as a threat to the foundation of mathematics would be a somewhat out of date response, because the dilemma apparently has been fixed since. Ed Pegg at Math.com says the Russell paradox was later fixed, via the so called ‘Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms’. “So far, no errors have been found”, Pegg says.

It’s a cliche but this is probably one of the first examples to show us that reality is not black and white. And rather than grey, it’s just bigger all the time. That is one thing every scientist agrees on. Perhaps the Russell Paradox only indicated an end to the era of the hunter gatherers in the mathematic sciences, but it is interesting to see that Russell went on to deal with this issue by basically working on a new domain in the sciences.

Rather than solving the problem in maths, his resultant thoughts were better applied in another field of science and the man is still credited in part for the rise of computer science. In attempts to argue his way out of the paradox, Russell invented a concept of a logical transformation as an operation that requires the equivalent of a quantum of time. He designed a set of logical operations in which a particular problem would be expressed as a program of operations to follow. 'We then turn the program on and let it run. Each logical inference is implemented in turn, and when the process is completed, we get our answer', Hoefer describes the essence of the work as.

A search for an ‘end theory’, some explanation for everything which, incidentally, will also decide the determinist – pluralist issue, is in some ways the goal of everybody’s scientific work, but the argument these days is more or less centered around alternative ways of discovering possibilities to obtain knowledge on this issue.

Working on this 'code of the earth’s genomics’ is doing hardly anything more than making silly presuppositions, efforts to piece together a puzzle which ultimately might just appear to be an exercise trying to stack boxes on top of each other in an atmosphere which doesn’t allow for gravity.

Anarchy (VII) Playing squash

2005-04-28T23:13:00.000+02:00

There might be some truth in saying that one’s first reactions to new things often prove prophetic. There also might be some truth in the idea that the first ten years of a Millennium pretty much show you what’s going to happen in the remaining 90 years. If any of this is to hold true, you can be even more confident that any leftist scholar’s reaction to the coming of age of the Industrial society in the 1970s with little alterations will pretty much inform you on what is happening now.

Many modern scientific theories today go something like this: this and this is happening, this and this is falling apart, this and this has been our response and o yeah, by the way our response is evidencing we are strongly being determined by this or that good or bad influence.
It’s surprising how addictive reading the theories can be. But perhaps to make sense of any of them, just split people into optimists and pessimists and create your own theory accordingly, plagiarising at leisure. Or you could redefine everything in up and down rather than left or right.
Someone who we won’t mention by name out of respect for his theory that the commoditization of everything is going so far that one needs to create a Temporary Autonomy Zone to throw around the ideas gathered at leisure no doubt between four walls as if they were squash balls. These ideas likely come into their own mimicking the effects of the ball that’s warmed up without cheating by having sneaked it under an armpit or knee hole or somewhere more zoney, but through some sound racketing.

(He is also by the way one of the few people I read stuff from that has a real opinion on an Eastern religion through actual practise. Call me naieve, but I hardly ever meet anyone who is scholarly and advocates an Eastern deity.)

In his case, if I’ve got it right, it’s led to the partitioning into four of the world: first world (which is acknowledged) second world (no tick), third world (tick) and fourth world (the private space, depending on your ideas of borders tick/no tick). He was talking on the radio to someone in 1996 so way ahead of the crisis that 9/11 has landed the modern world in, yet his idea is that the second world has ceased pretty much to exist, that everything really is one-ISM which he equates as capital.

On the one hand, there is some good news; Apparently the third world no longer exists, this informed mind tells us. But before you even can begin to wonder whether soon you’ll be marvelling in the greatest imaginative thought trip ever, the theory proves rather short fabricked on this one; it’s only moved places – the second world no longer exists, so the Third World’s moved up a notch.

Oooooohhhhh where are the people that still can cry? This is so deplorable, here’s one person wanting his own personal space and claiming to be a revolutionary at all costs apparently and the next minute he’s simply selling off the Third World to make his argument fit. Well, guess what; it is not going to work for me.

This person says “I [am] really proposing a third position, a position that [is] neither Capitalism nor Communism. This is basically, you could say, something that all Anarchist philosophy does. It's a neither/nor position. It's a third position. [...] There are not two worlds any more or two possibilities or two contending opposing forces. There is in fact only one world, and that's the world of global capital. [...] It's only the winner by default. And it tends to transform the world in its image.”

He then goes on to explain that this ‘one ness’ of the world leaves the second place open because capital has absorbed it and that the Third World therefore notches up.

By consciously banishing the Second World to a ‘non-space’, the scholar did speak truly prophetic words in that he spoke for many. I won’t go into the rest of his arguments, but you get the gist.

It’s been the trend for ages to open up our Western system to its elemental weakness through reasoning. An excercise that we thought we could continue to do at our leisure inconsequentially and ad infinitum. And then when the day came that someone proved us right boy were we surprised.

I too belonged to the school of thought that stated that so long as you are conscious of the things around us being an abstraction of deeper realities, you somehow have some means of maintaining a grip on reality even though the immediate organisation of things does not necessarily hand you this instantly. I maintain that that there is hardly a way of tuning things to their natural balance because any kind of tuning is by definition upsetting the balance of nature, one still needs to go after the eggregious disbalances in the world - like poverty, crime injustice and racism simply through actions that are the opposite of self servient.

I don’t want to sound like a witch, but really I think that by not solving big issues that at first sight will not stand in the way of our progress, is only making the disbalance bigger and might ultimately have consequences. Our language is shouting it out to us; the apparently natural overlap between the terminology describing the state of play in the Third World and that describing the hollowness that our richness appears to demand as its price indicates that the ‘life force’ (for want of a better term) in essence won’t allow our tinkering with these things inconsequentially.

The human reaction here is once, twice perhaps for proving how mature you are but as a rule we’d rather not witness the two converge. Any thought that is negative to the extent that talk of disasters enters the terminology describing our industrialized approach to life, without qualification is destructive in itself. Why? Because given the absence of a verification method, one is bound to link matters completely on an ad hoc basis, including wrong linkages. Yet by convincing the masses and making everybody believe and talk this way, a dynamic is developed which is completely culturally determined and probably quite disconnected from reality.
Had 9/11 not happened, something else would have been assigned to the space which we have started to confuse with the idea of just how important it is to be ‘forearmed’. You need to think yourself to be god and go over history and shift the weightiness of disasters around a bit to get an idea of the engineerability. In the meantime the notion that we are living on a dying planet isn’t hitting home with the force warranted.

In deciding our priorities, it is important to separate the wheat from the chaff. On the one hand it is in our nature to conjure up doom impending ideas simply because it is scientific to do so, on the other hand when we deceive ourselves for any length of time or at a broad level of society, this sometimes hits home with such a force that the only thing we think of when such a thing happens is to link them with the most out of balance or misunderstood issues.

It happens all the time. Yet romanticising our alienation from our surroundings is a dangerous thing. All alienation by definition is ugly and when we feel tempted to romanticise it, we’re assuming things that are so twisted that they seem good. On the other hand, there is something to be said for the people who claim that the newness of technology brings out some really imaginative thoughts in people who otherwise would have filled this space in their lives with addictions to other life forces, be they football, culture, religion anything away from the blandness of everyday life. In that sense, technology is only adding to our creativity by providing us the tools. In this respect, technology is only helpful. People in the beginning days of the internet failed often to understand what the people were talking about when they said that the impact of the internet was so huge. Even though currently this is more imaginable from a consumer point of view, the real impact of the internet is its use for companies to turn over their systems to web based systems, opening the world to them in ways not comprehended before.

It bears witness to limited or determinist thinking perhaps to stake too much on the belief that one’s initial reactions to new things are in some ways prophetic and setting the scene for things to come, but it is a healthy thing to do in as much as your identity shines through in the initial things and can continue to do so without any nasty surprises. I know it is hard to maintain these thoughts when you read news like Israel's just bought 100 deep hitting nukes and so on, but there is a logic to maintaining a personality, my father would say.

We need to laugh a lot in the knowledge that we might be entertaining spirits that bear the potential to both destroy and save us and this way be aware but not determined. There is a deeper wisdom in dancing to a tune beyond mere entertainment. The ability to transform one’s self by tricking your own consciousness is deeply human and a good exercise in judging the rationality of other assumptions we make. In this respect, it is likely everybody has reason to be very optimistic; we are likely way too manipulative to ever let our fate be decided by impersonal machinery!

Anarchy (VI) - Philosophic input

2005-04-25T00:36:00.000+02:00

Guess what, our Anarchy research project is very difficult, yet not completely impossible.

There are chances that scores of people are doing similar things at the moment, dreaming up scenarios for real change that’s based on some form of practicable reality.

Hegel called it ‘holding on to your time’, this defending one’s turf. It appears to be quite an alive and kicking scene in the universities, where some disciplines, notably the philosophers, are under fire from all sides not least from within. Some might say, serves them right for having been so long routinely calling other disciplines raisons d’etres into question themselves...

What I find a shame much like I was abhorred yesterday at the visual artists, is that to aspire to greatness is no longer necessarily an essential part of the philosopy population.

But it might prove that it is too easy to succumb to negative thought. It certainly is too early for our liking. That is the reason we thought today we’d give the arts a go, in case we’d sadly have to tell our client our efforts to research alternatives to state rule are an illegal use of public funds that are likely to stay public for ever.

Our lips no doubt marred, the English translation of ‘prulic’ in Dutch, the word we so prematurely dreamt up for the new life under anarchy rule. Yet, it might not even be necessarily be right to be so despondent. Because here comes Richard Rohre, who was a student later a professor of philosophy at Princeton. He's sure been through hell and back; As a student he was deeply disappointed when he found out during his first days in college that no one really agreed about even when a brick had been added to the edifice of knowledge and neither about what counted as an important philosophical problem.

Yet he says this did not diminish his growing conviction that the best of the analytic philosophers have done a lot for the transformation of the human self-image in perhaps only merely defending their turf.

Analytic philosophy favors discussing language over discussing experience. Prior to this ‘linguistic turn’, a phrase coined by Gustav Bergmann, philosophy mainly concerned itself with understanding great thinkers of the past and judging from modern day experiments who’s thoughts were how much alive still.

Some say the move away from the obsession with history has made the discipline more professional because it has become more akin to the sciences. Yet others slag analytic philosophy off as a bunch of idiots playing language games in the hope of finding a scientific approach that’s never going to be one conclusive defining agent of a reality that’s already proven elusive as the number one ground rule in these games.

Hot air or what?! It’s proof that if nothing else, these suckers do have a tendency to honor history. “What distinguishes analytic philosophy from other twentieth-century philosophical initiatives is the idea that this turn, together with the use of symbolic logic, makes it possible, or at least easier, to turn philosophy into a scientific discipline by itself. The hope is that philosophers will become able, through patient and cooperative research, to add bricks to the edifice of knowledge. So even though there will no longer be philosophical schools, but only philosophical specialities, the idea of Philosophy as a science is not entirely ridiculous.

Philosophy’s focus on history had more or less come to an end in favor of the inclusion of linguistics and logical symbolism, according to Rohre. During the time that philosophy was classified as a humanities discipline philosophers were expected to be able to talk about the relative merits of Plato and Aristotle, Hobbes and Spinoza, Kant and Hegel, Nietzsche and Mill.

That was of course not all you were supposed to do: you also had to take part in current debates in the journals to show you were part of an alive discipline. They certainly were a fun bunch to be around at the time. And they still are but they experimenting on a different basis now in trying to come up with live building blocks to edifice and knowledge, rather than mere ‘meaning’, as they so often are slagged off for.

I like to think that philosophers do things anyone else only thinks about on the toilet. Some prisoners must to excel at their kinds of experiments too. Philosophers undertake “rational reconstructions” of various parts of culture—for example, the testing of scientific theories, and other such weird stuff. Holding on to the spirit of the time by defending the home turf is key in surviving the outside threats through finding the transformative possiblities which the intellectual movements of the twentieth century have opened up for our descendants, Rohre says.

OK, we buy into this. Immediately. It is a nice move away from the depressing thoughts that you read everywhere that we might not be able to muster up enough original ideas to keep our civilisation or more our humanity going for much longer (see yesterday's post) Not from the vague premise that every sucker has their reason for justifying earning a living, but because we take his word for it. Because we have verified what he’s said somewhat. Inasfar as people like us, researchers with a political mandate, can make sense of such a broad mind.

What we really are after are some very broad outlines of realities on the ground or not but at least realities that are rather general. We then wanna run a coupla double checks on them. Just like the mean taxman give the 1980s activist artists a bollocking and see what’s happening now. And then make everything fit with the idea that autonomy is nearly at hand. Then have the guts to come up with our findings.

Being spat at by the youngest member of the office who by this time will be 13 no doubt. Perhaps all will be rather swifter when we make the project that little bit more tangible, when we get some real suckers involved. Tomorrow’s the day we’re going to get some real answers. Promise.

Anarchy (V) - Why Do We Wish For Utopia All The Time? Our Office Situation As A Barometer For The Quest For Happiness

2005-04-24T11:02:00.000+02:00

To go about researching the possibilities for anarchy, just think of a kid's toy - a little doggie on a string, which by dragging it along will waggle its tail somewhat falsely voluntarily. This is the way we at contentClix.com propose to go about researching the world around us. Everything is interconnected and we humans are like three year olds, in awe of ourselves when we drag our little doggies through playland and see that the tail waggles in just about any situation that we want it to. A yank here, a yank there and teeeheee, we've got a theory! Boy can we be proud. Why this analogy? Simple; this way of conducting research reveals a lot about our own little selves, our interests and ways of seeing the world. It's us after all that decide when and where to give the string an extra yank or two, where to derail the doggy and when to determine enough of this injurous path has now been trodden and simply swirl the doggy through the air altogether.

We are totally aware that our way of going about researching the prospects for alternative rule of a country of course opens us up to the danger that we pretty much reveal quite a lot of the general day to day situation here in the office. Where there is no hierarchy, where we submit to just about any sick thought we can lay our hands on for sheer entertainment value and where the pieces of dried food from days ago are falling off the ceiling at unspecified intervals but somehow suspiciously regularly and in suspiciously damnable places.

At the same time, we're also under a barrage of criticism whether strong and damning or just undermining mildly. It is working 'miracles' of all kinds boyz from the free world! Yet, we're having a lot to do to create a breakthrough on the product line. Where to yank and where not to, that is the question. Do we actually have to start creating RSS feeds into highly specialised packages of content to be re-sold? Should we form alliances with editors of ezines to rewrite their sheit? Or should we just think politics only and go in search of more sites to distribute to? We are prepared for all three but the coffee still tastes like we're on chemo therapy.

This is all due to indecision rather than anything else. We want to link into a chapter about indecisiveness, the weather and the psychology of dissidents and governments when faced with a hungerstrike, but so far they are proving quite ineffective in revealing much about anything.

The possibilities of anarchy as alternative to a current system of government ought to be totally chaotic and mimicking what you intuitively consider life without rules (which isn't what anarchists propose, but it works well as a research technique). Following through on this and drawing chaotically from various disciplines, is turning out to be -as an initial effort- quite amusing.

Organising oneself as a country or a group of people in need of an organised life beyond the core nucleus of the home, people tend to naturally sidestep ideologies that do not take authority imposed from above for granted.

Economists, the experts if not inventors of models, are refreshingly unscrupulous in doing away with the state organisation as we know it today, yet the alternatives they come up with turn out more tedious than the ideas of other scholars. Philosophers come out with by far the most interesting ideas but you might get somewhat frustrated gauging just how consequential or tennable their views are unless you get heavily into a good one. A pointless exercise if you need salient broad based ideas about reality.

So far, we believe that any structured research, a process that happens after we have gathered ideas from outer space from artists, should focus about a society based on technology or science or a mixture of the two. Some shapely ideas exist. For starters, the philosophy of science offers some decisive answers as to whether the philosophers are right in stating that researching the chances for a country to be ruled by alternative rule might be pointless because -as many economists, philosophers and scientists claim- the way reality interrelates is determined by forces we do not have a chance to control and if we did, it would not manifest itself naturally in a bland thing like a system organising a country. The material however offers great pragmatic ideas on the way a society can alternatively be organised.

The big question we need to address soon is whether reality is deterministic - ie ruled by big, excessive yet determinist logic and how technology treats us. We've said a lot about this subject when we recently dealt with the arts and the philosophers, but it looks likely that the physics guys will offer more answers.

That's all for today. O yes, and Cuba here we come: Some buggers on a campfire forum tell us we need to stick to the Middle East if we wanna write sense about foreign countries and then go on to accuse us of being inaccurate on something we were right on anyway. Good going, guys! Just what we'd like to call the foulplay we so eagerly try to avoid.

Anarchy (IV) - Artists That Don't Lead

2005-04-23T23:49:00.000+02:00

Linguistics are in danger of aborting our project before it’s even started, so we'll research the visual arts first, then the analytical philosophers and be ensured of having a ball at work longer!

We grabbed a copy of 20th Century Art in the hunt for our first salable clues in this no man’s land that we are treading, researching the possibilities of alternative rule to established governments that we are familiar with.

In establishing the concept and communicating why it is not entirely ridiculous to large numbers of people, we think we need to look at people who are virtuosos in bridging often very wide gaps with large audiences;

Popular visual artists.

Artists have proven to lend themselves to scores of similar projects and are surely gonna help us out now. Artists are highly individual people yet you can't say that they are mere islands because they are live connection chains that have such power it’s frightening. Artists more than any other species determine the time we live in specifically. Yet the creations they create after casting an eye over the same reality that we all live in are totally bewitched. They have imaginings that are far bigger than most of us unvisual lot! They define the culture we live in in ways that apply to our project perfectly. In times of change from one distinct arts movement to another you see artists go go through emotions that are quite similar to end of world ideas (which somehow tend to overjoy some people and sadden others), revolutionary ideas, this can’t be going on ideas, isn’t blue great ideas, you name it – they’re all ideas that are pronounced and highly fluorescent.

So, opening our copy of 20th Century gods and goddesses, we drag Bocconi to the stage. If only in honor of our youngest office member who tends to obscenize this name by shouting 'Bokkedi Bok Bok' almost every five minutes. Bocconi's input? Quite apt, I should say. He made his horse buckle through the world freely, upsetting other artists' safe and sound stretches of canvas donning square Cubist blocks by painting splintered and scattering pieces as if a bomb had been dropped on a flat surface. One brilliant arts site artchive details this about his 'Elasticity', which he painted in 1912. "[It is a] study of vigorous, sequential movement, as foreign to the intellectual dynamics of Analytical Cubism as the aggressively harsh and sour colors. A literal demonstration of horsepower, Boccioni's machinelike horse, with its virile, black-booted rider, thunders across an appropriately mechanized landscape of high-tension poles and factory chimneys. If the splintered planes of such a work depend on the Cubist analysis of solid and void, the reasons for this dismemberment are very different. Here mass has been shattered by the dynamic energies of horse and rider, with their up-and-down as well as forward motion, rather than by the quiet spatial investigations of Cubism."

Things in the past as a rule have been accompanied with lots of noise when change was at hand, but this work of art is particularly powerful in drawing in the spectator, which is another reason why we drag it into this debate. See how the comment on the spectator is way more imposing? This is people power in action that we in our era haven’t completely done with, even after a Century! (Evidence our project). Yet it will be doubtful if there will ever be such a noisy change in mood by painters. "If in Cubism the spectator, by implication, moves around static objects, in a Futurist canvas like this the spectator remains static while moving objects rush across his field of vision. Again, vestiges of an Impressionist viewpoint may be sensed here, especially in the way the extremities of horse and rider lie beyond the picture's edge. By using this Impressionist compositional technique, Boccioni implies not only that his tightly compressed subject is so dynamic that it must burst its four-sided confines, but that it is a fragment of a constantly changing visual experience."

There is a reason that we used this example to start off the search for clues that the arts reveal to us by way of communicating big changes like a transition to anarchy rule. It is simply that this is a rather obvious way of communicating the message of change after the undynamic, static cubic blocs - change as being dynamic and showing that unknown territories exist beyond the action packed screen even. More recent movements of course have similar ways of breaking up conventions yet they are bound to be more subtle and inclusive of the complexities that we’re bracing ourselves for. Not least because they also are not necessarily always a direct product of preceding movements efforts.

One obvious trap (I think of it as such in this context) are the very popular concept artists- you know those people who think through a concept and then don’t bother to execute it. Or, let’s rephrase this. Those people that present you with a work of art and explain a whole load to you that you simply can’t see as ‘wrought through’. These sweethearts are in dire need of investigating, as well as various other intellectual movements that DID manage to open up some great prospects for the generations after us.

Again initially, we’d like to posit that Concept artist to us are scarily indicative of the status of play in the world as we’re facing it (see also 'Don't Laugh Off The Russians So Easily and the article ‘The Variable Confines of Toilets in Art’).

From whenever Duchamp in the early 19 hundreds imposed the toilet on the museum he was on the board of until the unyielding zest of curators to exhibit anything that is showing humans as clever inventors of mass produced goods, has been quite a stirring development to put it mildly. We won't be done with it in one blog post, that's for sure.

Yet our being a bit sick of unquestioned works of art being imposed on us, renders the question valid that we might need to see if this is really illustrative of the status quo for the world at large too.

The artist Gregory Sholette who lives in NY and was involved in its REPO (reclaiming the streets project), and an expert on activist art writes in a report aptly entitled 'News from Nowhere: Activist Art and After': "These no holds barred new art world order reverses the old ideology of institutional neutrality. If once artists such as Acconci, Kaprow, Haacke and Rosler forced an increasingly problematic range of acts, systems, and things, through the incision made by Duchamp in the museum’s protective skin --things that the museum had worked very hard to prohibit-- the new 'culture industry' [a term dreamt up by Adorno and consorts] is outright predatory. It now summons every conceivable object, act, subculture, high culture, friend or foe, like an InterNet search-engine, forcing all to appear, to be questioned, to reveal their hidden aesthetic identity. Impinging on all other spheres of production and not unlike the modern legal system, it advertises its own positivity while assuring all concerned --from producers to dealers, from curators to consumers-- that anything can be made to bear witness to the goodness of diversity."

To our ears, any talk of 'diversity' reaks of fears that the human race is slowly becoming extinct.

Sholette is quite persistent as he continues to draw this line through to the arts themselves.

We are wondering if this is something that especially lives among the activist artist and are ready to slag him off as being more politically disappointed than we'd like an artist to be. His words are so obviously befitting the argument, he could easily be a contentClix.com writer...

Sholette says that perhaps the “best response to this new and erratic terrain involves putting less faith in the intrinsic transformative or transgressive potential of art and instead treating visual culture as one component of other social undertakings including political activism, public education and the battle over access to public space itself. Nevertheless within the present landscape the art activist, reduced to practicing a residual cultural form, perhaps even a nostalgic one for the moment, bides her time while putting faith in the unpredictable contingency known as history."

Ouuchh....

If you’d made these arts your be all and end all or if you found reason to believe this guy, you’d be validating vandalism as an art form probably. Wouldn’t you just wanna smash a computer and say this is the art of tomorrow which is by the way totally meaningless, but hopeful of deriving meaning from fucking up some schemes big time! Meaning would have gotten a new mean-ing; let's be totally insane and be mean from now on, sure it might work out some real love as a countermove.

(As a matter of fact, that is precisely what dear Sholette's works of art are seen to be characterising too... Perhaps we shouldn't dismiss him just yet.)

anarchy (III) - Countries Shy Away From Anarchist Whilst Theories Are Enticing

2005-04-22T14:05:00.000+02:00

Reasons why virtually every country on the face of this earth has shied away from experimenting with alternative state organisation are manifold but the concept 'anarchy' has never been totally absent from either socialist or capitalist theoric ponderings.

Anarchists mixed with socialists quite well in some ways and quite badly in others during the last century. It's only more recently that anarcho capitalism has become respectable as a viable idea, owing much to the work of Austria's Murray N. Rothbard, who is attached to the Mises Institute.

The fact that anarchy has mainly negative connotations is largely responsible for its relative unpopularity in the capitalist camps that shy away from overt libertarianism. Not entirely surprising. Looting and violence, which often accompanies scenes of anarchy and that often are mistaken as the phenomenon's main visible characteristics are a natural group reaction, however. People participating in plundering shops and destroying street furniture are by expressing this mob behaviour merely mimicking their understanding of their rulers' quiet behaviour. (See also our story on globalpolitician.com on this subject).

Yet written accounts of possible alternatives to organised government are numerous. Very many self respecting scholars have pondered the implications of being ruled by alternative ideas rather than the systems employed by standard governments and the issue received again much press and scholarly attention during the beginning in the war against Iraq's old rulers.

Most revolutions start with a short and intense period of anarchy in its negative form, before a new government takes over. It is generally not believed to be capable of yielding a form of life that goes beyond these what anarchy proponents would describe as 'initial by products' to otherwise hardly empirically viably proven rule. There are no examples of countries that have chosen to be ruled by anarchy or attempts at the establishment of similar alternative forms of societies other than fictional accounts.

One of the latest anarchists of name of the last century, Daniel Guerin, describes in his book ´Anarchism´ the way in which he sees his political leaning in a conversation with ´Philistine´ (one side effect of anarchists is that they pride themselves in philistinism, which comes in quite handy for modern day activists AND this blog!):

"You are a republican."
"Republican, yes; but that means nothing. Res publica is '
publica is 'the State.' Kings, too, are republicans."
"Ah well! You are a democrat?"
"No."
"What! Perhaps you are a monarchist?"
"No."
"Constitutionalist then?"
"God forbid."
"Then you are an aristocrat?"
"Not at all!"
"You want a mixed form of government?"
"Even less."
"Then what are you?"
"An Anarchist."

Much as though the term inspires romantic thought, the research is proving a bit difficult in that so much has been written on the subject and so little lived. This means that the various proponents are merely engaged in polemics with others that are either dead or lived a long time ago.

However much the mixture of champaign and impending success makes us more than before willing to go solicit our services to, god knows, the Russians(?), we have a hard nut to crack here!

By way of background; we're going to have a psychological chapter dedicated to what binds people in these groups together and what role the kind of Impending Doom ideas that you see also at the end of centuries / in times of change etc play a role in their thoughts and actions.
Why does major change (economically, politically, zeitgeist etc) make people so prone to negative feelings and others not? Why do some people need a slap in the face before they see the blatant truth and others not? Sure some person will have made something out here. It is bound to be enourmous fun to find out more about the various approaches that people have proposed practically in the face of change.

Of course it is interesting to find out about how these feelings have been expressed in the arts, but there´s more action probably in some people´s approaches toward practical materialisations of things, like movements’ proposals. It would be awfully interesting to see internal communications documents. Some stuff we read so far has yielded sparse insights we actually want to read- you know the romantic ideas- none of the outside meddling off putting sheiterama is going to be included in this piece of sheit, just so you know. Sheitethesheit sheit sheit. It’s only going to be sheit like ‘A copy of crime and punishment was used by some European grouping to launch a bomb.’ We’re still thinking about Bin Laden’s handwriting, the Al Qeida group's referrencing a 'bird's slit throat' in a telephone call to a Syrian diplomat weeks prior 9/11, but only for marketing purposes of course.

In our initial research we all need to pay heed to detail in most of our readings. Everything is rather important as a possible ´spellbinder´ for later ideas. Railroads, speed, what have you, it´s all gonne tie in with the greater document, because there´s increased focus on ideas of speed and daily life in conjuring up the circumstances needed to tell people their nation state might surrender its responsibilities back to the people themselves.

To create a situation in which the realities of every day life that seem quite large to people´s minds into manageable realities by groupings or the people themselves requires a transformation of behavior that´s almost impossible to conceive of, let alone effected.

The obvious area one needs looking at is the visual arts. To get inspiration from artists and the way they communicate is vital if we want to get going on the project. As of now, we don´t know if we want to go as far as to say that artists will show the way, but from an intuition we would judge that they are up for a bigger role than ever before. Perhaps our grand children will laugh at us. Perhaps a non existent public life makes everybody an artist.

We´ve created a second word too for the interaction between people on the streets and in shops and in marriage tents. It is 'prulic'. Not public, not quite private either. The word 'public´ will only refer to the people clapping their hands in prulic entertainment buildings. But then, it might turn out we are totally wrong...

ClixyPlays on Anarchists (II) anarchy - ontology and planning ahead

2005-04-22T09:04:00.000+02:00

The transition of our society to a new modernity has changed it dramatically due to technological advance. Some believe that the fact that technology is part and parcel of our transformative process and that this means that we are ruled by it more or less. Herbert Marcuse was among the loudest of the first wave of people to shout about the dangers of this process. If we confuse technological progress for having won the battle for control of nature, there is a vast danger that we forget our humanity in the process.

Until a few years ago, people said that giving in to arguments like this was to effect especially their 'end theory' (so to speak). The debate is now dominated by issues like Nano technology, which somehow does make it look like people who say that there is an internal dynamic going in the sphere of technological advance that is somewhat alien to how human logic works.

I am getting a bit bored with faulty computers and otherwise ill equipment so to continue the barrage of thoughts on issues to do with Anarchy I started a chapter on the arts. Somehow I have an eery feeling that I want to get away from this soon too. That is the fault of that awful artist whose claim to fame is domination of the almost entire last century - Marcel Duchamp.

I think I will work on developing a distaste for him and the idea that determinism can be mixed into the arts as a final form without making the insult that this is into an expression. I think that even 'mingling' in this realm is an exercise that's wrong. But then, all the last Century people pretty much spent fighting over these issues. Perhaps it's wiser to ask what really are valuable thoughts because I think the urge that one feels to continue to drag godknowswhat into this debate is a reaction to something that is so relentless and stupid that it's best to stop for a moment, think about one's energy resources as rather finite in relation to the infinite energy resources of the 'thingyness' that you fear the arts are reduced to and call it quits before the incubator harboring the reddish brown residue, o no, bricks of the artificial intelligence arts edifice of knowledge, impartial yet lumbering you with failure or successes whathaveyoumagic is running at full speed toward a crash situation.

No. Forget about it. Any real danger is hardly at hand. A crisis would erupt only as and when people start to ask how long you can hold views as the one ascribed above as tenable in wanting to invent a new form of society. Exclusion of this kind -an 'human' exclusion- is however unlikely to ever occur. I take anything with a bit or a grain of salt yet even I think that I will start to subscribe to the point of view that we really are being taken over by something that is as doom impending as the staunchest anti techno observer makes out when people in society start to be divided about the issue.

But for the sake of the client who's entrusted us with this research into the possibilities of an alternative to government rule, let's be on the safe side. Let's assume that there needs to be a degree of 'Everything in leaps and bounds' as the way of 'selling' a transformation/regime change to a form of positive anarchy. It is perhaps key, or at least a salient feature of these plans. In times that humans are craving human treatment from above whilst they still somewhat know what they are asking for it is vital to document the . What? You don't believe that we're all slightly scared of being sussed to sleep whilst technology takes over our minds, souls and hearts? That we not already need a fits and bounds treatment to wake us up?

Think of the tons and tons of ways in which we are obsessively measuring advances of the technological base that our societies are so electronically imperceptibly donning. There are more examples of just how suspicious we are. So to combine the knowledge of this insubstantial base that we out of self respect awkwardly gather information on into a workable solution, we are bound to not settle for anything less than a shock or a little series of them. When you fumble around in the dark for the light switch you go through pretty much the same thing and the light tends to suprise you (also a good indicator of just how tolerant of boredom one is).

To give the technological era its due, it is making us ask questions that no doubt were also relevant in earlier times - but then we might have assigned them to the realm of religion or so. It is not important so much who is right here - the people saying that technology takes the place that humans reserve their intangible ideas for or the ones that say technolgoy simply brings out the best in this otherwise inactive anyway area. It is important however that the issue itself is not absolutised by the wider society. Or perhaps that's good for a while, so we at least get aqainted with the ins and outs of what we are dealing with and how we tend to react to this intangible deity. A society's response to something new is perhaps only adequate if is evidencing a kind of freedom to display ugliness to ugly systems. Perhaps the fact that no real resistance exists is more a symptom of sickness than if there would be reactions.

I feel in the mood to be perverse and think I will let the outcome here depend on how Duchamp is getting out of the picture at the end of the day. By limiting the reaction to new realities by being so openly and will fully at the whim of the forces around us, he's perhaps been a leaps and bounds person. It was somewhat new of course too- this determinism. I am sure he's quoted millions of times saying that by our actions we trigger mechanisms that we either wanted to prevent from or put on a course of action. Perhaps I will take a shortcut and just look up the issue causal determinism in the sciences in some recent edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and see how it ties in with the project.

O, and there's still that bugger Fidel Castro sitting in the outbox for remission to areas including that sad Cuba. For our project on anarchy he's no more than an afterthought which by mere exercising is instrumental in highlighting to one's consciousness just how wrong certain situations have gotten. Perhaps the shortcut here is to find a handsome writer from Havana, who's deyant of the Castro imposed ban of smoking (true!!!)and who's churning out page after page employing only the A HA erlebnis technique.

The crisp copy that is emerging will read as if the writer does nothing but ironing pleads with a wet handkerchief into thick and stubborn material. When you write as if you are ironing, you're bound to be seen to keep at it until the handkerchief is dry rather than until the plead has been imprinted. Evidence the critics no doubt. Writing is nothing more than pretending to impose manipulated thought onto observant readers. That's all it is until your world has gone around another turn.

clixyPlays on Anarchists (I)

2005-04-17T13:00:00.000+02:00

THIS CLASSIFIED DOCUMENT WILL BE STORED IN A NUKE-PROOF BASEMENT. WHERE THE ONLY DANGER IT WILL POSE IS TO BE CONSIDERED 'LOST'

These pages will hopefully be found some time after the Western civilization as we know it now has either collapsed under the weight of speedy successes or is thriving to such an extent that we today won´t recognise it as anything we helped build and that the generations after us will simply not be able to connect with our sad and not even very amusing civilisation.

All millions, bazillions of webpages currently in existence might have gone missing, our entire civilization might have gone amiss, but not these communications.

Wanna know why? Simple. This blog is classified. Highly. So highly classified, no one bothers to read these pages. On one level, this is because they don either an American type of humor or no humor at all. At a deeper level (not only psychologically) this blog´s simply not read because it is sitting in a storage space somewhere safe. As we said: nuclear bomb proof.

Should something happen to all of us, millennia on from here, traces of our civilisation are surely going to be found and Clixy will likely be shuvved in with the Romans by our great-great-great-grand children.

What's happening? We´re going to have a makeover soon. We have still no verifyable clue as to what's gonna work to get a reasonable flow of people interested in our copywriting activities, but it´s going to be a case of more stuff, hyperlinked text all in a seriously recognisable context of something equally seriously recognisable. We are still maintaining our plans to have Clixy running afoul on hotshots, cyber bandits and the like, create some traffic and have a natural flow of content emerging around the issues raised.

But we've got to be more inventive if this is going to work out any of the anticipated change. If we wanna at least preserve our target of getting classified with the Romans in determining our historic fate. But of course it's way nicer to make it to anywhere nearer the time we actually live in. Romans are so barbaric...

Someone from Technorati kindly offered to help us out here, but we’ve equally kindly refused. The stupid fuss he’s managed to create all by himself shows how right we were. Apparently, the WWII propaganda pictures this boy altered for personal self inflation purposes did not go down to well with some people.

It´s quite difficult not to throw ourselves into these rows, but we're aiming for more long term and serious traffic. In matter of fact, we have decided that these deliberations are going to be kinda like group discussions. But not to worry, we´re going to work on ridding ourselves of the flaws in what ought to be highly readable prose.

We're positioning ourselves as a bunch of mature people who nevertheless still suffer from the sickness caused by the belief that the world can become a better place. Putting it stronger, we in matter of fact really believe that we have better chances than ever to create perfection, rather than hellholes on earth.

Why the moodswing?

We´ve just won an award from a major political entity to research the prospects of ‘Heaven on Earth’, that's why. Us! We! These nong heads!

Start sending dating agencies’ creme de la creme this way, we’re game again, despite the acne!

And also, make sure to delete us of all your mailing lists unless you are sending highly classified heaven- on-earth-no-less info that also indeed survives a nuke attack or the crash with the moon.

Yeah yeah yeah, out but no longer down! This victory in words is revenge on paint for not yielding its mysteries. Dumb blobs! Go dripping somewhere far away from here.
The youngest member of our clan´s comment on this life saver; ´LEKKER BOKKE VOOR JE´, which translates as ´nice goat jumping for you´ (We Dutch are such a charmingly oblivious race...) The bottles of Champaign purchased five years ago finally splung - the first word we´ve appropriated on behalf of the heaven on earthers, for the grand exercise of opening a champaigne bottle.

We love being naff.

As part of the new focus, we’re going to have to work our asses off, rewriting the contentClix.com business plan that happens to be based on the principles of total anarchy as an anti form - a concept that everyone here actually thinks of as somewhat stupid first thing in the morning. It's ironic, but researching the possibilities of life along anarchist lines on behalf of so important a client simply warrants the setup to be thrown out the window, however sheepish we feel doing so. None of us home wreckers, criminal record donning insaniquaria inhabitants are morning people so we´re going to have a new plan meander into meaning completely naturally as the day matures.

Redefining our business plan is more than a a symbolic act. It might well be the first by any organisation in the possible new reality that's no doubt going to be recorded in the history books if it actually evolves into being. The business plan is our humble salute in that to us it's nothing less than the definition of heaven on earth.

None of the five of us just yet feel like giving up on dreams of crushing false ideas, trampling on them, stamping out meanness, eradicating assholes in the process, illegitimatizing big business AND crashing our chances to be part of the first ever human attempt at combining celestial and terrestrial forces on such a grandiose schale. No. For the time being, you'll hear us sheepishly say euphemisms indicating that the blissful perfection is not materializing instantly. We'll lay off the swearing at the impossibilities that are part of everyday life. For now.

To only make up for it in the way way we'll go about the project. We think to start off our research by saying something that comes up first in the head of whoever's pulled the shortest match stick as we're sat around the table is The way to begin our endeavours.

Clixy's of course the lucky contender and is curiously spurious; "Anarchism is a form of destructive behavior romanticised", she says.

Waaaaaaaoooooo.
Sorry guys calling yourself anarchists, but it happened to spring to mind first. And why not immediately tidy up the misconceptions? If any of you out there are ready to retort, this is not the moment, much though Clixy's on for clobbering you back most of the time.

WHAT THE HELL IS ANARCHY IN ITS SERIOUS FORM THESE DAYS anyway?

Perhaps isn´t at all destructive in itself. Anarchy might be an idealism that can´t tolerate interference by the state. It simply can´t - so let's say our boss' favorite line when he leaves the office (where he feels so at home that he believes it's part of his heart) 'BYE State. BYE House, BYE BYE organized sickos'. Whatever we will turn out describing anarchism as ultimately doesn´t matter one single bit now. We´re not there yet. Suffice to say.

(The youngest member of the office says I’ve always wanted to say that. Which is true. The others on the list are ‘We come in Peas’ and ‘Excepting qualities that are altoghether evidencing subversiveness, the so and so society is on its way to Utopia’)

I -like a modern art museum curator begin to display an urge to document whatever our communications entail, say ‘O, then don´t mention ‘are we there yet one single time’ later this summer on our way to our holiday destination... Upon which he kicks our ass. Time is three minutes to six. No critics, do not miscontrue this - this live interaction is as ready as ready made art comes. This document is gonna be printed out and sent LINEA RECTA to the drawer that makes up OUR pruliate museum.

To come back to this anarchy award, it´s precisely what we as an office were ready for too. It might sound hollow and you might easily say that you are really ready for this kind of challenge when it´s handed you on a moment that you had no clue where else to focus the entire group, but it is not.

Yet the contradiction -having evolved into a shape that’s virtually non consequential in nature (its beginnings strictly speaking don’t matter and the only demand it makes is that it is respected) and then finding that this is exactly the way forward is both non plussing us and making us feel we’re ready to jump off a mountain cliff cause we must have grown wings.

Were we ready for a project on anarchy? Yes, we were! Did we think yesterday that we´d be sipping champaign today? No we didn´t! Is the champaign drinkable? Not in the slightest! But it´s gotta be said, we were studying very hard on issues such as globalisation, Russia, new ways of thinking about the global ways of thinking and the apparent lack of direction. You name the issues involved with anarchy, we´ve been along the sidelines!

But then who knows, perhaps the cupboard needs an entire sweep through. Yet Clixy´s running afoul continuously was meant to be coming off age -all signs indicated this- and the project's working miracles in this respect, whether we're coming OR going. It's called living on the edge in some people's books.

Perhaps a more robust explanation is the one liner in the letter awarding us this very assignment. Which, sorry to say, is a bit classified. But, only a bit, our lawyers tell us. It´s on behalf of a quasi government institution in the Northern hemisphere (Not Russia, not Norway, but they do eat fish, I won´t say any more or I’d be handing John the Baptist’s head to you on a platter). The line in question reads like this: ´Your project commences as of immediately and entails collating empirical statements accompanied by numerological data on the viability of calling an end to the nation state of (country xyz).’ (By the way, in case we set off international news agencies inquiries that might be risky in nature, it's not Israel. Or Iran, or Iraq, neither Jordan or any of the Gulf states).

Can you see now why we´re still drunk on the very idea of being part of this project??? Jeez, why did´t we OFFER such a grandiose idea to anyone? It´s really what we´ve been steamed ready for. You might have thought you could forget about anarchists as a serious group of people, pretty much because they have had their say in the 1960s and a few years later. They fouled up, sorry guys but you missed the point. Somehow this can’t be more wrong. You´d be surprised if you read some recent reports which show the movements are abound still. Calling themselves perhaps anarchy decorators, or other weird names, boyz and girlz of over 40 might be quite naughty if you really knew their minds. Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle...