¿Que Cosas Hay En El Mundo?

En El Mundo hay O'Bama :-

Obama: 'El mundo ha cambiado y debemos cambiar con él'

Worth noting the bible on which he swore was closed.
I've written before that Izzy Stone had fun with the fact that previous presidents selected pages of the book to have open while they tried to pull one over on the almighty and the tax payers of the USA.

I wonder what Izzy would have made of Mr O'Bama?

I can't help thinking that a little Isaiah between friends would not go amiss at the eastern end of the med just at the moment.

'come let us reason together'

You know it has a certain something, reasonableness is it? I wonder who Isaiah got to write it for him. Probably Toby from the West Wing, or even CJ.

Our friends in the frozen north

Interesting, inspirational, article via open Democracy, Iceland: "It will fix itself" by Tobias Munthe. I like the idea of thetta reddast, especially the it will be done interpretation. We will do it and we will be better, stronger and more able to weather future storms. The impact of the global downturn on a small country is substantial and the article recognises this and the opportunity it provides for fundamental change...

... there is consensus on the need for change, not only in terms of political and economic restructuring, but also in relation to values and even to national identity. The era of Icelandic excess - parading around in shiny Range Rovers (now referred to as Game Overs), weighing up the benefits of Greek versus Spanish extra virgin olive oil - has come to an end.

and maybe...

For a population as small, interconnected and homogenous as Iceland, the possibility of a genuine cultural shift is less of a pipe dream than it might be for a larger nation with greater class, race and net-worth inequality than this insular outpost in the North Atlantic.

There are some interesting concepts; scratching your own itch is very Icelandic, Auden would have been proud, and the thing about bubbles is that they burst. What I would like to see is a culture of ‘bubble wrap'.

Clearly the "In Cod We Trust" mentality is not enough to save the nation at this stage, but that is not to say that Iceland might not find some salvation in its old religion.

Good luck to them I hope they share any lessons they learn with us!

The Creative Commons

As always, a thought provoking link from John Naughton at Memex to this essay.
Love the hat, and the jacket, maybe it's a whistle! Anyway, sartorial faint-heartedness aside, a nice balance by Howard Rheingold.
A positive view of the network.

One of the first questions that arose from my earliest experiences online was the question of why people in online communities should spend so much time answering each other's questions, solving each other's problems, without financial compensation...

and the explosion of creativity

...that followed the debut of the Web in 1993 was made possible by deliberate design decisions on the part of the Internet's architects−the end-to-end principle, built into the TCP/IP protocols that make the Internet possible, which deliberately decentralizes the power to innovate, to build something new and even more powerful on what already exists.

We have lived long enough to realise that there are dangers.

A population with broadband infrastructure and ubiquitous computing could be a captive audience for a cultural monopoly, given enough bad laws and judicial rulings. A population that knows what to do with the tools at hand stands a better chance of resisting enclosure. The more people who know how to use participatory media to learn, inform, persuade, investigate, reveal, advocate and organize, the more likely the future infosphere will allow, enable and encourage liberty and participation. Such literacy can only make action possible, however−it is not in the technology, or even in the knowledge of how to use it, but in the ways people use knowledge and technology to create wealth, secure freedom, resist tyranny.

Resisting enclosure, resisting tyranny.
A very powerful image.