Little or no progress has been made on majority of environment policies analysed in Friends of the Earth report

Progress on the prime minister's pledge to make the coalition the "greenest government ever" was heavily criticised today by environmental leaders.

The former government adviser, Jonathon Porritt, said the likelihood of the government living up to the promise made almost a year ago was "vanishingly remote".

In a report commissioned by Friends of the Earth, Porritt said ministers were failing to deliver on key environmental pledges, and policies had been watered down, delayed or even abandoned.

In the wake of the report, the Friends of the Earth executive director, Andy Atkins, warned that without "real political courage", Cameron's green ambitions would be simply hot air.

From proposals to sell off public forests to a review of feed-in tariffs for small-scale renewables and the decision to scrap a £42m marine renewables development fund, the government has failed to champion green issues, the report claims.

According to the research, little or no progress has been made on three quarters of 77 environmental or sustainability policies that were analysed.

Porritt said the review of the policies showed that the "bad and the positively ugly indisputably outweighed the good", and that growth at all costs had won out over efforts to create a green economy and thousands of low-carbon jobs.

He said Cameron had not been personally visible on green issues, the Treasury had been hostile to environmental policies and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) was being "trampled all over" by other Whitehall departments.

And the "big society" and the localism agenda is being driven by the ideological priority to shrink the state, rather than delivering improvements in people's local environment and lives, he claimed.

Porritt was chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission, which was set up to hold the government to account on its policies on sustainability but which was scrapped last year in the "bonfire of the quangos".

In his new report he warned that in the last year, most of the "important battles" on the environment had been lost, including the Treasury's refusal to let the green investment bank borrow funds until 2015, which he said would reduce its ability to drive investment in the low-carbon economy.

But the report did flag up a number of green initiatives which it said were positive, including scrapping plans to expand airports in the south east, announcing the world's first incentives to promote renewable heating and agreeing to roll out smart meters to 30m homes by 2014.

Porritt said: "The prime minister's own credibility is at stake here – as is that of the Liberal Democrats who have clearly failed to use their influence inside the coalition to ensure a better performance on the environment and sustainable development.

"It's certainly not too late, but things are going to have to change dramatically to make up lost ground."

Atkins said: "Confidence in David Cameron's boast to run the 'greenest government ever' is fading fast.

"Rather than creating a green and safe future, his government has steadily dismantled pledges and policies that would help him achieve it.

"David Cameron could be building a prosperous low-carbon economy out of the rubble of the old, creating new jobs and industries for recession-hit Britain – but green development is continually being sacrificed in favour of growth at any cost.

"Unless the prime minister starts to show real political courage and leadership on the environment, his green ambitions will simply be more hot air."

Last month, green campaigners and business leaders attacked the government's environmental record, with one investor saying the coalition's actions threatened to "choke off the lifeblood of the green economy."

I keep getting asked, "what's the point of Empire Avenue?" Or told, "Empire Avenue is just a stupid game." My friend Robert Scoble thinks Empire Avenue makes a good News Reader, and that's about it. The thing is it is not just a game. It's definitely not a news reader (I'm sorry, but as forewarning, Robert will be sorely disappointed, just like he was with Quora, if that is his interpretation of the service). I already covered this a bit already calling it a "catalyst for a new economy". The thing is it's much more than that - it's a new era of social websites, one where capital can trump influence, and those with capital can become influential. It's a network of Capitalism vs. Socialism.

It's All a Game

A year or two ago, I participated in a panel at BlogWorld in Las Vegas where we talked about "the Twitter game." As founder of a site that helps people improve the relationships they build on social networks like Twitter (as, at least I hope, opposed to gaming them), I'm all too familiar with this game. You follow someone in hopes that they follow back. If they unfollow you, you unfollow them. All this increases your numbers and you're perceived as influential as a result. The really successful turn this number into more than just a number and actually show substance to the following they've built. This is why if you follow a lot of people, you'll naturally build your following, especially if you provide some sort of value on top of that.

The game goes farther than Twitter though. In the blogging world it's simple. There are several strategies to this "game". You blog a lot, provide value in the content you post, and link to a lot of people to get them reacting and responding and linking back to your post. Or, you focus on the SEO side so you appear in Google. As you do these things and provide value as you do it, people will naturally follow, and the traffic will come. Your readers increase.

On Facebook it's really easy - almost everyone you send a friend request to will accept it. Just send out a ton of friend requests to influential people and you'll max out your 5,000 friends really quick. Or, if you have a Facebook Page, take the blogging approach I mentioned above, throw in some Facebook advertising, and then measure like crazy to determine your proper ratio. You'll have thousands to hundreds of thousands of fans in no time.

Of course, some times you just get lucky. In that case, just gamble - try different things until something sticks.

You see, in every case above, there's some sort of "silly game" involved. True, you have to provide substance to gain the most benefit and to maintain your trajectory, but building numbers on any social network is just a game. Even the relationship building process (which I am much more about than the methods above) is part of that game.

On Empire Avenue the "silly game" is different though. Those that play it the way they do on Twitter and Facebook and in blogging will see some success, but they won't be the leaders in the network. I think it's a matter of socialism vs. capitalism.

Social vs. Capital Networks

In a "social" network, the focus is on gaming social relationships - how can you pique someone's interest so that they form a relationship with you? What are the psychological lures to get them into your network? What services can you share with one another to build that network? How can you complement each other?  How can I better learn from my close friends and family? How can I get the latest and most relevant news from (and about) those I trust? Most importantly, how can you find influencers that can further boost your potential? For the "right" way to do this, I recommend Guy Kawasaki's book, "enchantment".

In a "capital" network, the focus is different. The "capital" network is focused on gaming capital, and finding people with capital that can further boost your potential. How do you get that capital? You participate on the site and interact with people and promote other people that are doing well. In a way, Guy Kawasaki's book will help you with that as well. Except in a capital network you're rewarded for doing so. On a social network the reward is not so evident. It's important to note that a Capital Network is not a news sharing service. It's a relationship sharing service. You don't "subscribe" to anyone or anything on a Capital network - it's a 2-way relationship if you're going to have any sort of success.

In a capital network it's not about finding people that are already popular. It's about finding the little guy that will make you wealthy, and in the long-term, that will make you popular. In a "capital" network, like any investment-oriented society, you want the little guy that will go big (like Facebook a couple years ago). You don't want the guy that's already big (like Google or Apple are now). At the same time you don't care if they're popular or not - you do care that they are returning dividends for you because in the long run that produces dividends for your investors, making you a more lucrative investment. You want the guys that are participating most on the network and providing real value to their peers, in not just monetary form (because remember money on a capital network is based on activity and participation and trying to help each other out). In a way, each good "follow" or investment is in a sense another startup you're putting your money and words and influence behind, only you know the founders of that startup have held their weight and provide real, social value back to you.

Typical influencers aren't going to understand the "capital" network. It's an entirely new frontier. It's a place where the little guy can make a name for themselves and get on the radar of other influencers. At the same time it's an opportunity for influencers to maintain their influence and grow even further. Watch what my friend Chris Pirillo is doing - he really gets this, and in just 2 weeks has become one of the fastest growing investments on the network as a result.

New Frontiers

From a network standpoint, Facebook was a new frontier at one point. The influencers weren't allowed on it. It was just your college buddies and their friends. It was meant for the "little guy" to be someone. It was meant for them to make a name for themselves, and many people embraced the opportunity.

The web was another new frontier. That's where the Scobles and the Pirillos and the Winers and the Arringtons and others made a name for themselves. They were the influencers of that era, formerly "nobodies" (no offense intended, as they are certainly not such today) who took advantage of an era and made a name for themselves. They've maintained that reputation throughout the Facebook and Social era. That era was all focused on a subscription and news-oriented model.

We're in a new land grab on Empire Avenue, and I'm pretty sure there will be other competitors in the future. It's a capital-driven frontier, one where they require you to put your money where your mouth is, but also maintain your own value as you do so, so others can gain a return on you just as you gain a return in them. It's one where I truly believe there will be a real conversion rate that equates to real dollars, and people will offer goods and services based on that conversion rate.

The New Economy and True Conversion Rates

What do you gain from the Capital Network? Yes, you gain relationships as you find new people producing real dividends, but on this network there's actual money in it for you. Trust me on this one. There will be a real exchange, worth real money at some point as reward for those that truly focus on relationships, and those that ignore this will be running to play catch up. At the same time, those that really invested, those that really focused on real returns (aka dividends and people really involved on the network), not just influencers and people whose stock value grows (and focus on people that do the same) will be a close-knit community of people that know each other, that know each others' names, and that work with each other for even further influence.

Capital Networks Are More Than a Game - They're About True Relationships!

With Empire Avenue people are forced to truly put effort into building relationships. They're force to truly get to know others. They're forced to truly promote their friends, and build up their friends. And they're rewarded for such. To me, this is a much better network, one where I can know people truly care about me and my success, not their own "me" economy.

Ironically, it will be capitalism that will make us social.

If you want more information on how to use Empire Avenue effectively, I highly recommend, and agree with, Chris Pirillo's tips that he posted today (I am an investor, but proud to invest in him because he truly participates on the network, and produces dividends because he focuses on relationships as he does so). Be sure to read over Chris's tips, as they share further my vision for the service.  At some point I'll share my own as well.

In the meantime, you can follow me at STAY on Empire Avenue here (Click the last link if you haven't joined. Click this link if you're already a member.). Let me know if you're getting ready to join and I'll provide you with tips as well - I'd also like to invest in people truly willing to participate and focus on those that care about relationships (aka dividends).

At the 5th annual Invent Your Future conference on April 26th and 27th in Santa Clara, California, professional women came to interact with nationally known authors and business experts. Approximately 200 women attended, including many local students as part of the IYF Scholarship program. Ruth Stergiou, CEO of Invent Your Future Enterprises, spoke during the conference about helping showcase professionals for the next generation of women and getting teen girls interested in computer science through a program called “Dare to be Digital."

In addition to book signings, breakout sessions, and roundtables, Invent Your Future provided a place for Silicon Valley professional women to network.

Speakers at the conference this year were top-notch, and although it was not the theme, social media was a topic that resonated through each keynote and session. The first ten minutes of Wednesday’s conference turned into a social media free-for-all: Attendees were invited to turn on their mobile phones and use them to text, tweet and Facebook pictures of the event (see above) to friends and co-workers everywhere.

Invent Your Future Speaker Highlights:

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon: The author of the New York Times best-selling book, The Dressmaker of Khair Khana, spoke about spending time with the women of war-torn Afghanistan, where she learned to see them not as victims, but as powerful survivors and entrepreneurs.

Julie Hanna: The chair of the board of directors at Kiva, an online microloan organization that has helped people start businesses around the world, spoke about how technology is a force for politics and business. She said, "People don’t view themselves as victims. Most don’t want charity, they want access.:

Almaz Negash: The CEO of Entwine Global, spoke about her childhood in Africa, the powerful influence of her mother and the necessity that we, living in one of the richest places in the world (Silicon Valley) have to make opportunities for the underprivileged women who live among us, but are often invisible.

They all agreed that social media and the web can help by connecting people and allowing women to participate in each other’s stories around the globe. Social media brings democracy to the conversation.

Jane Edison Stevenson: The vice-chairman and CEO of Korn/Ferry International and author of Breaking Away: How great Leaders Create Innovation That Drives Sustainable Growth spoke about how our society is becoming more fear-based; the way to counter that, she said, is through innovation.

Nancy Duarte: The CEO of Duarte Design spoke passionately about how women are hard wired to both nurture and conquer, and folded that theme into a personal anecdote about climbing Half Dome in Yosemite with co-workers.

Guy Kawasaki: The former Apple fellow, author and highly animated motivational speaker got the most laughs of the entire conference with his ten step overview explaining how to “enchant” others in a business setting. His latest book is Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.

It was interesting to see how much credence and emphasis most speakers gave to the importance of social media as a tool to help empower business women around the globe. The Invent Your Future audience was highly engaged by the topic as well. A workshop session called “Celebrate Your Brand Using Social Media," hosted by SM consultants Beverly Macy and Teri Thompson was very well attended. It generated a discussion around their contention that “reviews are the new advertising and conversation is currency”.

I had a chance to interview one attendee (Nadine Lezada, IT Business Manager for Marketing and Customer Service; Lifescan Division of Johnson & Johnson) regarding her thoughts about the conference. In her own words,

"After attending this year's Invent Your Future Conference for Women, I walked away feeling motivated to envision new ideas, empowered with renewed confidence and energized to take bold steps in directions I didn't think about before.”

Corporate partners for Invent Your Future included HP, Oracle, American Airlines and eBay. Keynote sessions were hosted by Bay Area Vista (NBC) producer Janice Edwards, as well as award-winning journalist and former KPIX (CBS) news anchor Sydnie Kohara.

The Dalai Lama’s seven-page letter to the Tibetan parliament-in-exile in March 2011 announcing his full retirement of all political and administrative responsibilities is a historic political moment. Tibet’s spiritual leader, in exile in India since 1959, has in issuing it taken two positive steps: towards reforming the political authority of the highest religious institution in Tibet, and encouraging and empowering the young Tibetan democracy.

At 76, the Dalai Lama has long been conscious of his role as the symbol of Tibetan unity and independence; but he has always understood and emphasised that the Tibetan problem will remain after his demise. In spiritual terms, the Dalai Lama continues to represent an important moral voice in a world that poses hard questions about how to respond effectively and in non-violent ways to the violence of the age, and how to build a better world that struggles against the causes of war and terrorism.

The Dalai Lama’s democratic effort for Tibet is a strong expression of his Buddhist and Gandhian convictions, founded on two principles: self-reliance and non-violence. These two principles will remain central to any democratic measures taken by the new Tibetan prime minister, Lobsang Sangay, and to all future dialogue and compromise with Beijing.

In the view of the Dalai Lama, democracy is a source of power for the powerless and of hope to the hopeless. It offers a politics that is completely at odds with the logic of occupation and violation of human rights in which Tibet lives today.

In his acceptance speech on the occasion of the award of the Nobel peace prize in Oslo on 10 December 1989, the Dalai Lama proposed a wider vision: “the conversion of the entire Tibetan plateau into a zone of Ahimsa, a sanctuary of peace and non-violence where human beings and nature can live in peace and harmony.” 

China’s economic strategy in Tibet has been in the opposite direction, and has caused immense cultural and environmental damage and increased the social marginalisation of Tibetans. Chinese officialdom - which still describes its violent takeover of Tibet in 1950-51 as a "peaceful liberation" - has long hoped that Beijing’s economic and cultural policies in Tibet will create a new generation of Tibetans that are less influenced by Buddhist religion and that, with the passing of the Dalai Lama, will accept finally to be part of China.

In this context, the Dalai Lama’s decision to relinquish his duties as political head of the Tibetan people in exile has increased anxieties in Beijing. No wonder, for the Dalai Lama’s democratic strategy places him a step ahead of China in setting the terms for the tumultuous situation in Lhasa that might follow his death.

The revered Tibetan institution of the Dalai Lama has played a dual role of spiritual and political authority since 1642. Its political reform opens the way to one of the major tests of Tibet’s modern history, namely trying to strike a win-win deal that reformulates Tibetan autonomy within the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Much is at stake here: the capacity to resist Chinese efforts to restrict traditional rituals, to reverse the the neglect of the Tibetan language at the expense of Chinese, and to defend the ecosystem in the face of unbalanced development.

The political path

In his address to the European parliament in December 2008, the Dalai Lama reiterated Tibet’s desire for “genuine autonomy” within the PRC and reaffirmed the will of the Central Tibetan Administration to move beyond fear and help to promote a culture of trust between the two nations. The major task of the prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile, Lobsang Sangay, is to promote such a culture. Will he make a difference to future dialogue between Beijing and Dharamsala?

So far, the 42-year-old Harvard law researcher has said that his top priority is to ask the Chinese authorities to review their "hardline" Tibet policy and take a "more moderate and liberal approach". This said, both Chinese and Tibetans will continue to expect the Dalai Lama to have an important influence on future negotiations between Tibet and China, and over the question of Tibetan autonomy. In the final analysis the leaders of Tibet’s reformed institutions, temporal and spiritual, need to work together to build and develop a new Tibet.

The road to Tibet’s autonomy is paved with many difficulties and challenges. That is why the election of Lobsang Sangay and the Dalai Lama's announced departure from political life are noteworthy. They mark a new chapter in the democratic exercise of the Tibetan community, which can show China and the world that even amid marginalisation and hardship the Tibetan community-in-exile is capable of forming a stable and transparent government.

The five years of Sangay’s prime-ministerial term offer Tibetans an opportunity to create a robust interface for the Chinese government to deal with. Even if Sangay does not succeed in convincing Beijing to abandon its hardline phase and accept the principle of autonomy for Tibet, his democratic election and the evolutionary move from the Dalai Lama reveal the anachronism of China’s authoritarian rule over Tibet. The Dalai Lama has once more proved to Tibetans and the world that he is not only a charismatic spiritual figure but a figure capable of bringing wisdom to democracy.

Sideboxes

'Read On' Sidebox: 

Dalai Lama

Central Tibetan Administration

Isabel Hilton, "Tibet's small exercise in democracy" (New Humanist, 125/6, November-December 2010)

Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy

chinadialogue

Tibet Parliamentary and Policy Research Centre

 

Sidebox: 

Ramin Jahanbegloo is professor in the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto. He was previously Rajni Kothari professor of democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. His twenty books include India Revisited: Conversations on Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2007). His website is here

Also by Ramin Jahanbegloo in openDemocracy:

"America's dreaming" (30 August 2004) - with Richard Rorty

"Richard Rorty: living in dialogue" (20 June 2007)

“The modern Gandhi” (30 January 2008)

"Olympics of shame" (9 April 2008)

"The new middle east: intellectuals and democracy" (3 February 2011)

"The new middle east: a civic revolution" (17 February 2011)

Plus - contributions to symposiums on Iran, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011

Related stories: 

Dharamsala: forging Tibetans’ future

Tibet and China: the past in the present

Tibet, Palestine and the politics of failure

Tibet, China, and the west: empires of the mind

China and Tibet: the true path

Tibet: questions of revolt

How to think about Tibet

Tibet: revolt with memories

Xinjiang, Tibet, beyond: China's ethnic relations

Tibet vs China: a human-rights showdown

The Italian has seen enough big games and dealt with enough demanding owners not to be fazed by Sunday's showdown

A man as well balanced as Carlo Ancelotti has no business being a football manager. Certainly not in England's Premier League, where managers are expected to argue among themselves and snipe at referees as a matter of routine.

Not Ancelotti. Even approaching a weekend such as this, when he takes his Chelsea squad to Old Trafford on Sunday knowing that a win would put them level with Sir Alex Ferguson's team at the top of the table, nothing shakes his equilibrium or disrupts his air of knowing geniality as he wanders in from the Surrey sunshine after a training session to ponder on the problem of Wayne Rooney or to praise the match referee, Howard Webb. Not even the knowledge that his destiny is under discussion in two countries.

His team, fresh from winning the Double, started the new season with a rush. But the winter months saw a six-point lead transformed into a deficit of 15 points to Manchester United, the new leaders. And until the west London side climbed out of their mid-season slump, putting together 11 wins in their past 14 matches, the man who arrived in England two summers ago appeared to be heading for the exit.

Had Chelsea's season continued to disintegrate, the turning points would have seemed obvious. The first was the abrupt and unexplained dismissal in November of Ray Wilkins, Ancelotti's No2, an old friend of whom he said: "We wouldn't have won a thing without him." The second was the appearance in January of Fernando Torres, a £50m striker whose arrival forced Ancelotti to modify his preferred formation and who took 10 games to score his first goal.

The whims of powerful men, however, are nothing new to Ancelotti, whether they be Gianni Agnelli, Silvio Berlusconi or Roman Abramovich, and from his present vantage point he can argue that the real turning points were quite different.

"Manchester United against Arsenal last Sunday, and our win against Tottenham," he said. "If Arsenal hadn't won, it would be a different atmosphere around our game against United." Another one, he said, had come last month at the Hawthorns, just after their Champions League elimination, when West Brom scored first but Chelsea fought back to win.

On Friday he received the manager of the month award – "for April," he emphasised, implying that the fates should not be tempted. But no one knows whether a second league title, or even a near-miss, combined with a second consecutive failure to progress beyond the last eight of the Champions League, would be enough to persuade Abramovich to allow him another year at Stamford Bridge.

"It's not the moment to speak about my future," he said. "I would like to stay, but I am very quiet and calm. At the end of the season, the club will take the decision. If they decide to change the manager there is no problem. I've tried to do my best. If they consider my job good, I will stay. If they don't, they can change."

The unexpected turnaround of the past couple of months will have done his claims little harm. "Nobody thought we would be able to fight for the title," he said. "We were talking about qualifying for the Champions League. Fifteen points behind United was too much of a gap, but we closed it because we did really well for two months. Last year we built up a very good relationship with the players, and this atmosphere helped us to maintain good control of our confidence."

He has a perfect record – three wins out of three – against Ferguson in league matches and last year, after the victory at Old Trafford that took Chelsea to the brink of the title, he and Wilkins went into Ferguson's office for a glass of wine, only to find the United manager preoccupied by the racing on television. That match represented United's last defeat at home.

"I know," Ancelotti said. "Thirty matches, only one draw. Obviously they are the favourites as they have three points more. If they win, they will win the title. If we are able to win, then goal difference becomes important, and we have very difficult games against Newcastle and Everton, so nothing would be decided. But it would be important to be at the top of the table, after such a long time."

He spoke of the threat of Rooney and of Ryan Giggs, whose passes destroyed Chelsea in the two Champions League ties last month. But mostly that of Rooney. "He is a key player for them. It's difficult to stop him. His position is not so easy to control – he moves a lot, he comes back and works for the team. Obviously we have to do something. We never put one player against him, because it means changing our philosophy too much and we want to play our football. But it will be important to stay compact and keep our midfielders' and defenders' lines very close."

There has been one definite change of policy during the season. At Abramovich's behest, and with the forthcoming rules on financial fairness in mind, a group of young players – Daniel Sturridge, Gaël Kakuta, Jeffrey Bruma, Patrick van Aanholt and Josh McEachran – were among the substitutes during the first half of the season but have not been seen in the side in recent weeks.

"When we decided at the start of the season to use more players from the academy, it was a good decision," Ancelotti said. "We began really well, we were top and some of them played, although not many games. But when we had a difficult moment it was not easy to give them that responsibility. So we gave some the chance to go out on loan in January. We will decide at the end of the season if they come back or not."

Whether or not he will be around to influence those decisions, Ancelotti is intent on making the best of the last weeks of his very mixed second season. "Our bad moment was too long, I think. We could have done better. But now destiny has helped us to fight for the title again. We are excited and very happy. The season has not gone, as everyone suggested. This team is still alive."

Rye Barcott was serving as a military intelligence officer with the Marines in Iraq in 2000 when he decided to set up a non-profit organization in Kenya, a continent away. He called it "Carolina for Kibera," for the slum in Nairobi he visited during his junior year at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Barcott had journeyed to Kibera to understand ethnic violence in anticipation of his future Marine assignments. "I was overwhelmed by the sights and the sounds and the fact that young kids could grow up in rooms the average size of a dorm room and be separated from your [sic] neighbor by a thin piece of tin and right outside your door step runs open sewage," Barcott said. Since Barcott and some friends in Kibera founded "Carolina for Kibera," the village has opened a medical clinic, a community center, a sports program for kids and a waste management program. Many people see contradiction that Barcott waged war in Iraq while promoting peace in Africa -- fighting war while waging peace. Barcott says he believes there are ways to make the two co-exist. "The military finds itself on more and more of these amalgamations. I don't think we are really good at it and that was my real take away," he said. "I think we are best served when we integrate the use of the military with other forms of American influence and power." You can hear KUT's Erika Aguilar's interview with Rye Barcott by click on the audio player button above.

If you think machines have liberated us, think again, says film-maker Adam Curtis. Instead we have lost our vision

It was amateur footage of an event involving an early video game called Pong that gave Adam Curtis the idea for his new documentary series.

In 1991, a computer engineer from California called Loren Carpenter organised a mass experiment in a huge shed. Hundreds of people were each given a paddle, and told nothing. But on a big screen in front of them was projected a game of Pong – a very basic computer game, where a ball is knocked back and forth on a screen, like table tennis. Each half of the audience jointly controlled the bat on their side of the screen; they had to operate it together and, spontaneously and without discussion, they successfully played a game of Pong, whooping and cheering at their collective collaboration.

"It was like a switch went in my head," Curtis says. "Carpenter saw it as a world of freedom with order. But I suddenly saw it as the opposite – like old film of workers toiling in a factory. They weren't free – they looked like disempowered slaves locked to a giant machine screen. It was a video game, which made it fun, but it still made me wonder whether power had really gone away in these self-organising systems, or if it was just a rebranding. So we became happy components in systems – and our job is to make those systems stable."

The new series, called All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, takes complicated ideas and turns them into entertainment by the use of the vertigo-inducing intellectual leaps, choppy archive material and disorienting music with which all Curtis fans are familiar. The central idea leads Curtis on a journey, taking in the chilling über-individualist novelist Ayn Rand, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, the "new economy", hippy communes, Silicon Valley, ecology, Richard Dawkins, the wars in Congo, the lonely suicide in a London squat of the mathematical genius who invented the selfish gene theory, and the computer model of the eating habits of the pronghorn antelope.

You can see why Zoe Williams once wrote that, while watching one of Curtis's programmes, "I kept thinking the dog was sitting on the remote."

Perhaps because of these emotionally engaging techniques, Curtis inspires cultish devotion, and not just from viewers – he has won six Baftas. A former politics tutor at Oxford, and a Tiggerish man of 55, it's surprising to learn that he began his career in TV working on the zany magazine show That's Life! ("It taught me two things," he says. "That people who think they are funny aren't funny. And how power really works in television – through fear. One day I went to film a dog that sang to its owner's bagpipes. The dog refused to sing. After three hours, I rang Esther Rantzen and she simply said, 'Darling, don't come back until you've made it sing.' So I made the dog sing.")

But he says he'd always been interested in the idea that you could "fuse high seriousness with popular culture, and cut out the middle bits". The new series can be seen as a continuation of a theme to which he has often returned in his 20 years in films: that power works through many different channels, not just Westminster or the White House. So Pandora's Box, in 1992, was about how politicians had tried to use scientific ideas to control society; The Mayfair Set, in 1999, was about how entrepreneurs such as James Goldsmith paved the way for the resurgence of the markets; The Century Of The Self, in 2002, looked at how Freud's theories of the unconscious were used to promote shopping from necessity to leisure activity; The Power Of Nightmares, in 2005, was about how politicians were turning to fear to try to restore their waning influence in a society disillusioned with them.

Now he has moved on to machines, but it starts with nature. "In the 1960s, an idea penetrated deep into the public imagination that nature is a self-regulating ecosystem, there is a natural order," Curtis says. "The trouble is, it's not true – as many ecologists have shown, nature is never stable, it's always changing. But the idea took root and spread wider – people started to believe there is an underlying order to the entire world, to how society is structured. Everything became part of a system, like a computer; no more hierarchies, freedom for all, no class, no nation states." What the series shows is how this idea spread into the heart of the modern world, from internet utopianism and dreams of democracy without leaders to visions of a new kind of stable global capitalism run by computers. But we have paid a price for this: without realising it we, and our leaders, have given up the old progressive dreams of changing the world and instead become like managers – seeing ourselves as components in a system, and believing our duty is to help that system balance itself. Indeed, Curtis says, "The underlying aim of the series is to make people aware that this has happened – and to try to recapture the optimistic potential of politics to change the world."

The counterculture of the 1960s, the Californian hippies, took up the idea of the network society because they were disillusioned with politics and believed this alternative way of ordering the world was based on some natural order. So they formed communes that were non-hierarchical and self-regulating, disdaining politics and rejecting alliances. (Many of these hippy dropouts later took these ideas mainstream: they became the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who decided that computers could liberate everyone and save the world.)

Another, rather different kind of fan of the network society was Alan Greenspan, for many years the world's most important central banker. "Greenspan believed that networks of computers, like networks of nature, could stabilise themselves," Curtis says. "And technology could turn everyone into heroic individuals, completely free to follow their own ideas." In his individualism, Greenspan was inspired by Ayn Rand, the Russian-born novelist who abhorred altruism, praised the "virtues of selfishness" and still has a massive following in the US 29 years after her death.

At first, the vision that machines had created a new stability seemed true. On Greenspan's watch, computers allowed investment banks to produce complex mathematical models that could predict the risk of making any loan or investment. If a risk could be predicted, it could be balanced by hedging against it. Hence, stability. There would be no more boom and bust. It was the "new economy".

That stability was, of course, an illusion; it was followed by the greatest economic crash since 1929. But, as Curtis says, the price of the bailouts was paid by ordinary people, via the state, rather than by the wealthy financiers who lost all the money in the first place. That's because, despite the illusion of ordered non-hierarchy, some people have vastly more power than others, and in many cases have had it for centuries.

He draws a parallel with those 1970s communes. "The experiments with them all failed, and quickly. What tore them apart was the very thing that was supposed to have been banished: power. Some people were more free than others – strong personalities dominated the weak, but the rules didn't allow any organised opposition to the suppression because that would be politics." As in the commune, so in the world: "These are the limitations of the self-organising system: it cannot deal with politics and power. And now we're all disillusioned with politics, and this machine-organising principle has risen up to be the ideology of our age."

If you are a component in the system, it is difficult to see how power has shifted, Curtis says. "The power of politicians has been taken by others, by financial institutions, corporations. After the crash, the elite used politicised power to rescue themselves. Politics was seen to have failed, to have been corrupt, empty."

This has cultural expressions, as well as economic. We, and our feelings, are now the centre of everything – from reality TV to confessional memoirs to blogs. "There's no one like, say, Tolstoy, who wrote of both man in his world and the architecture of his world," Curtis says. "Now there is no context, just the feelings of one person. The philosophy of our time is summed up by Bill Murray sitting in a submarine in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic saying, 'We're all a bit shit but that's OK.' We have no grand dreams. So of course we embrace a nice stable order."

Why don't we have big ideas or dreams any more? "Because now that there's nothing more important than you, how can you ever lose yourself in a grander idea? We're frightened of eccentricity, of loneliness. Individualism just wants to keep the machine stable, leads to a static world and a powerless world. Rand is individualism carried to its most extreme form, yet she's very popular, and not that far away from how a lot of people, especially the young, feel today."

All of this, Curtis says, means we're missing the bigger picture. "We never talk about power these days. We think we live in a non-hierarchical world, and we pretend not to be elitist now – which is, of course, an emotionally attractive idea, but it's just not true. And that's dangerous."

He believes that because British politics is now obliged to appear non-hierarchical, it has become managerialist, obsessed with process over vision – a recognisable idea to anyone who lives in this triangulated, professionalised political age. He says this doesn't just affect the political parties (although he singles out Andrew Lansley as managerialist-in-chief), but politics in its widest sense. "Even the 'march against the cuts'," he says, referring to the TUC march in London in March, "it was a noble thing, but it was still a managerial approach. We mustn't cut this, we can't cut that. Not, 'There is another way.' Why are we so frightened of a few bond managers? Why can't we challenge the 'markets'? Why do we treat them as if they're their own precious ecosystem? The idea of proper change, or really shifting things, is alien to us today. We just argue about how to manage a system best. It's a moment of high decadence. And we've forgotten that we do have deep responsibilities to people who really are powerless." (He has fascinating material on this about the west's interventions in Congo, as "a place that generates different kinds of myths about us as human beings, things that the west longs for but that also make us terrified".)

In his films, Curtis draws on recent attempts to overthrow power in autocratic countries, describing the spontaneous revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan as a "triumph of the visions of computer utopians of the 1960s, with their vision of computers allowing individuals to create new, non-hierarchical societies" – just like in that mass game of Pong. "The internet played a key role in guiding revolutions that had no guiding ideology, except a desire for self-determination and freedom." But the desire for freedom itself was not enough, he says. "In all those revolutions, that sense of freedom lasted only for a moment. The people were brilliant at overturning the power – but then what? Democracy needs proper politics, but people have given up on saying that they're going to change the world." The Arab uprisings began after he finished making the films, but he sees these in the same way. "It's as if these people assembled spontaneously on Twitter and they just want freedom. But what kind of society do they want?"

He does not deny that Twitter and Facebook had some impact – at least organisationally. But he has strong views on social networking for anything beyond straightforward organisation; he considers the sharing of emotions online to be the "Soviet realism of the age".

He quotes Carmen Hermosillo, a West Coast geek and early adopter of online chatrooms who in 1994 argued that, although the internet is a wonderful thing, your emotions become commodified. "It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some island of the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their individuality," she wrote. "This is not true. I have seen many people spill out their emotions – their guts – online and I did so myself until I began to see that I had commodified myself." Says Curtis, "On Facebook and Twitter, you are performing to attract people – you are dancing emotionally, on a platform created by a large corporation. People's feelings bounce back and forth – happy Stakhanovites, ignoring and denying the system of power. It's like Stalin's socialist realism. Both Twitter and socialist realism are innocent expressions of the ideology of the time, which don't pull back and show the wider thing they are part of. We look back on socialist realism not as innocent but as a dramatic expression of power; it expresses the superiority of the state, which was the guiding belief at the time. I think sometime in the future people will look back at the millions and millions of descriptions of personal feelings on the internet and see them in similar ways. This is the driving belief of our time: that 'me' and what I feel minute by minute is the natural centre of the world. Far from revealing that this is an ideology – and that there are other ways of looking at human society – what Twitter and Facebook do is reinforce the feeling that this is the natural way to be."

Curtis doesn't tweet or Facebook – send him to the gulag! – but he has an excellent blog, "which isn't about me or my feelings, because I don't think I'm as interesting as the stories I'm telling".

Where will the next big idea come from? He wonders about China. "Is it a stable system? Or a mercantilist economy that's gone too far?" Or closer to home. "If things go really bad, they change. If things get really bad, they say, can we have a dramatically different, better kind of society?"

Since the modern world is all about me, me, me, here's a confession: Curtis's ideas have made me run for my life. In 2009, in the course of It Felt Like A Kiss, the sublime theatre event Curtis put on with Punchdrunk about the birth of hyper-consumerism, I was separated from the audience and sent down a long, dark corridor, which I took to represent the apotheosis of individualism. I remember thinking, I must run because my life depends on it – I knew it wasn't real, but I couldn't help myself. It was terrifying. The ideas in All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace are similarly mesmerising and disturbing, but they're also a provocation: have we really given up on the hope of changing the world in our lifetimes? Or is that in itself an idea worth fighting for?

• All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace begins on BBC2 on 23 May at 9pm. See Curtis's exclusive video for the Guardian.

The Taliban have declared categorically that they will fight on as long as any US forces remain in Afghanistan

The most important result of Osama bin Laden's death is likely to be a new US approach to Afghanistan. President Obama is now essentially in a position to "declare victory and get out", without risking too much in terms of US public and military opinion. Unfortunately, everything I know of the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, as described in my book, Pakistan: A Hard Country, suggests to me that the strategy towards which the Obama administration is tending could have disastrous consequences for Afghanistan, Pakistan and the US.

This is above all because the proposed new US approach is structured around the needs of US domestic politics and a crude approach to killing terrorists, with very little attention to the realities of Afghanistan or the reasons why many Pashtuns in both Afghanistan and Pakistan support the Taliban.

As things stand, the likely Obama strategy will be the following: the US will build up the Afghan National Army to the point where it can hold the main towns in the Pashtun areas without the help of US ground forces. Most US troops will withdraw, but the US will keep bases in Afghanistan from which its planes will smash any concentrations of the Taliban aiming at capturing the cities. US aircraft and special forces will continue to target any identified groups of al-Qaida in the country.

This is basically the Soviet strategy between their withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, albeit with the crucially important difference that the USSR did not keep bases in Afghanistan – it did not need to since it had them just over the border in Soviet Central Asia. And it must be said that up to a point, the Soviet strategy worked: the Afghan regime of Najibullah Khan which they left behind outlasted the Soviet Union itself. I was a British journalist with the mujahideen at the siege of Jalalabad in March 1989, when they were indeed decimated by the government's airpower when they concentrated to attack the city.

For Washington, this strategy appears to meet several objectives: It would greatly reduce US numbers and US casualties in Afghanistan; it would be in accordance with Obama's declared approach of reorienting US strategy towards targeted operations against terrorists; it would prevent Taliban victory and scenes of US defeat like Saigon in 1975, and at the same time avoid the perceived humiliation of having to negotiate with the Taliban leadership whom the US has spent years denouncing; and it would keep US bases in Afghanistan, which sections of the US security establishment see as useful to threaten Iran, raid Pakistan and maintain US influence in the region.

What is wrong with this strategy? Firstly, it means that the Taliban will continue their war. Their leadership have declared categorically that they will fight on as long as any US forces remain in Afghanistan. In the absence of any peace settlement giving them a share of power, the Taliban will also go on fighting against the Kabul regime.

US air and ground raids will go on infuriating the Pashtun rural population and encouraging them to support the Taliban. Because the war will continue, so will the Taliban's reliance on al-Qaida as a source of expertise, and on heroin as a source of revenue. And while the Afghan army may be able to hold the cities, it is obvious that it and the rotten Afghan state will never be able to extend real authority into the countryside.

Secondly, will the Afghan army even be able to hold the cities? The Soviet-backed regime after 1989 did, but it was in many ways a much more cohesive regime than the one that the US has created, with an army based on the old Afghan Royal Army, and led by a Pashtun with real authority among Pashtuns. The present Afghan civilian state is terribly weak, while the army, though large and heavily armed, is demoralised and deeply divided between Pashtuns and Tajiks.

A horribly plausible scenario for the future looks like this: the Afghan civilian regime disintegrates after Karzai steps down in 2014, leading to a coup by the Tajik commanders of the army. This is followed by a counter-coup by Pashtun troops, and civil war in the government-controlled areas. The US is faced with the choice either of pulling out, and allowing Taliban victory in the Pashtun areas, or of sending US troops back in to take over again.

Faced with this scenario, far better would be an attempt at a peace settlement with the Afghan Taliban, starting with the creation of a Taliban office with diplomatic immunity in some other Muslim country, and peace-building measures such as local truces. The broad outlines of a possible settlement have emerged from conversations with former leading Taliban officials such as Mullah Zaeef and Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil.

They involve the phased withdrawal of all non-Afghan armed groups from the country: on the one hand al-Qaida and all terrorist groups (including those targeting Russia, India, China, Iran and Pakistan), and on the other, US and Nato forces; de facto Taliban control of most of the Pashtun areas, with some form of power-sharing in a weak government in Kabul; and a Taliban commitment to stop heroin production in their areas in return for international aid to those areas.

This last is a question usually neglected by the US but is of crucial importance to the UK, Russia, Iran and increasingly China. Heroin has done more damage to our societies than terrorism; and we need to remember therefore that for more than 30 years, only the Taliban (in 1999-2000) has been able to prevent heroin production, because only the Taliban has exercised effective control over the Pashtun countryside. The idea that our allies in the Kabul regime and the Afghan army will be willing or able to do so is ludicrous given their record.

Would such a settlement hold? The Afghan Taliban must realise – and their allies in the Pakistani military certainly do – that whatever happens it will not be possible for them to conquer the non-Pashtun areas of Afghanistan in the face of US, Russian and Indian help to their local enemies. After all, they had a real fight to do so in the late 1990s when only Iran and a weak Russia were ranged against them. US carrier-based aircraft would still give the US great ability to coerce the Taliban and back their enemies if the Taliban broke the treaty.

On the other hand, everything I know about Afghanistan, and everything we see in the news about the Kabul regime and its armed forces, tells me that what is certain is that the US strategy sketched above will not work. As to whether the Taliban would agree to such a deal – well, we won't know that until we've asked them.

Benjamin Franklin once said, "there is perhaps not one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive. Even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility."

Another of America's founding fathers, John Adams, battled against arrogance as well, "Vanity, I am sensible, is my cardinal vice and cardinal folly; and I am in continual danger, when in company, of being led...by it."

Most leaders have an abundance of ambition, talent, and confidence, but few possess the humility necessary to sustain influence over time. Many shun humility, seeing it as a sign of weakness or self-doubt. Yet, in reality, humility is the pinnacle of wisdom and assuredness. Here are seven qualities humility brings about in the life of a leader.

#1 Responsibility

Humble leaders readily accept responsibility for failure. When things go wrong, they instinctively look within to understand what they could have done differently instead of looking outward for someone to blame. Willing to take ownership of mistakes, humble leaders are quick to fix them; they do not wait for someone else to solve a problem.

#2 Objectivity

In the words of Ezra Taft Benson, "Pride is concerned with who is right. Humility is concerned with what is right." Humble leaders do not consider their own ideas and projects to be sacred. They do not insist on having their way, but on following the best course of action-regardless of who suggests it.

#3 Open-Mindedness

Humble leaders have awareness of how much they don't know. As such, they're inquisitive, quick both to listen and learn. Secure in their abilities, they are unthreatened by the input of others. Not only do they welcome feedback, they solicit it.

#4 Flexibility

Whereas prideful leaders rigidly adhere to an initial strategy long after it proves to be unfruitful, leaders with humility nimbly switch courses as soon as warning signs appear. Unafraid to admit having made a bad decision, they're able to adjust quickly.

Humble leaders have no qualms about abandoning a product that's past its prime-even if they personally had created it.

#5 Inspiration

Humble leaders are appreciative people. When they experience success, they're quick to shine the spotlight on others. Mindful of their dependence on others, humble leaders regularly express gratitude for the contributions of their teammates. Their thankfulness inspires those they lead and boosts team morale.

#6 Respect

Humble leaders heed John Andrew Holmes' advice: "Remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others." They see life as far bigger than themselves, and add value to other people by serving them. By committing themselves to the success of those within their sphere of influence, leaders gain respect and earn loyalty.

#7 Connectedness

Humble leaders embrace the Law of Significance: "One is too small of a number to experience greatness." They recognize that their vision cannot be accomplished in isolation, so they invite others to join them in pursuing it. They cherish relationships and intentionally cultivate friendships. They view life, not as a quest for individual glory, but as an adventure to be enjoyed in the company of fellow travelers

There are many good qualities a person can have that will benefit themselves and others they work and interact with. But the next time you seek to evaluate leadership and success in yourself or in others in your organization, why not look at the "humility level"? It's a great barometer of whether you can expect smooth sailing or rough waters in the future.

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BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
A PROCLAMATION

As our society has changed, so have the challenges facing women raising families. Many American women are raising children at home while caring for an elderly parent, holding down two jobs, serving as the sole parent in a family, or defending our country overseas as a service member. Our Nation's mothers not only look after our needs and teach us to be compassionate and responsible, but also manage households, build careers, and improve our neighborhoods and communities. While the roles and responsibilities of mothers have evolved, their guidance and care remains as strong and constant as ever.

On Mother's Day, we celebrate the extraordinary importance of mothers in our lives. The bond of love and dedication a mother shares with her children and family is without bounds or conditions. Whether an adoptive mom or grandmother, mother or partner, the women who raise us show us that no hurdle is too high, and no dream is beyond our reach. As sons and daughters, we show our gratitude for the women in our lives who care for us, shape our values, and set us on the path to a limitless future.

Throughout our history, mothers have made remarkable sacrifices for the well-being of their loved ones. Nearly a century ago, Anna Jarvis, who had suffered the loss of her beloved mother, campaigned with many other Americans to make Mother's Day a recognized holiday and pay respect to all women raising children. Today, we continue to celebrate the influence, love, and nurturing our mothers provide in our lives and in our national life.

To support the parents who are raising tomorrow's leaders, my Administration is committed to doing all we can to create jobs and economic opportunities for families across America. We are striving to help mothers in the workplace by enforcing equal pay laws and addressing workplace flexibility as families balance the demands of work, child and elder care, and education. My budget strengthens the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit to help families afford the cost of quality childcare. The tax-cut package we passed last December extended expansions of the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit, providing a tax cut for 15.7 million families with about 29.1 million children. The Affordable Care Act gives women more access to health care and better resources to protect the health of their families by requiring new insurance plans to cover wellness benefits for children, ending the exclusion of pre-existing conditions by insurance companies, and extending parents' health coverage for young adults up to age 26. First Lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move!" initiative is also providing mothers with helpful tools to support their children's healthy growth.

Mothers are the rocks of our families and a foundation in our communities. In gratitude for their generous love, patient counsel, and lifelong support, let us pay respect to the women who carry out the hard work of motherhood with skill and grace, and let us remember those mothers who, though no longer with us, inspire us still.

The Congress, by a joint resolution approved May 8, 1914, (38 Stat. 770), has designated the second Sunday in May each year as "Mother's Day" and requested the President to call for its appropriate observance.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 8, 2011, as Mother's Day. I urge all Americans to express their love, respect, and gratitude to mothers everywhere, and I call upon all citizens to observe this day with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this sixth day of May, in the year of our Lord two thousand eleven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-fifth.

                    BARACK OBAMA

Today, NASA announced three future key missions preselected as part of the Discovery program named GEMS, TiME and Comet Hopper. This is an important announcement, which was eagerly expected by our community.

The NASA Discovery program is a low-cost mission ($425 million FY2010) program aimed at developing and supporting a well-defined and narrow-range science mission in the field of planetary exploration. Discovery is a dynamic and highly valuable program which had led to a lot of well-known missions with a wide range of scientific goals including (adapted from Visions & Voyages Decadal survey):

- NEAR Showmaker (Feb 1996) to rendezvous the Near Earth Asteroid 433 Eros.
- Mars Pathfinder (Dec 1996) to land and trek on Mars surface (Sojourner)
- Lunar Prospector (Jan 1998) to orbit the moon
- Stardust (Feb 1999) to collect samples of comet 81P/Wild
- Genesis (Aug 2001) to collect solar wind sample
- CONTOUR (July 2002) to flyby to comet nuclei (unsuccessful)
- MESSENGER (Aug 2004) to orbit Mercury
- Deep Impact (Jan 2005) to impact and flyby comet Tempel 1
- Dawn (Sep 2007) to rendezvous the large main-belt asteroid 4 Vesta and 1 Ceres
- Kepler (Mar 2009) to search exoplanets by transit
- Grail (launched in Sep 2011, orbit insertion in Jan 2012) to measure the moon gravitational field

With the exception of the CONTOUR mission, all spacecrafts launched in the framework of Discovery program were a success. Because of their robustness several spacecraft had their lifetime extended and they were reused for a new mission with different scientific objectives. For instance, after exploring the comet Tempel 1, the orbiter was renamed EPOXI and was used to characterize exoplanets by transit and flyby the comet 103P/Hartley.

In 2010, NASA released an announcement of opportunity for a 12th Discovery mission with a potential launch before end of December 2016. A panel of scientists and engineers from NASA and elsewhere reviewed 28 submitted missions. These missions encompass all bodies of the solar including asteroids and comets, which have been traditional targets for the Discovery missions because of their proximity. However the 2010 Announcement of Opportunity was slightly different since it included as well the use of Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator (ASRG) developed by NASA and the US Department of Energy. This radioisotope power system is more efficient than the previous generation and works without solar panels allowing planetary scientists to envision longer missions and giving us access to less hospitable region of our solar system.

Today's NASA announcement is an important first step since the leading teams of these projects will receive $3 million from NASA to validate their concept and refine the design of the spacecraft. In 2012, another panel will meet and choose the mission which will be selected for Discovery-12 and launch in 2016 or before. For planetary scientists in the US and elsewhere, this pre-selection is important since it gives us an idea of the future projects in our field and it could influence the direction of our future research.

Let me finally describe these selected mission concepts:

The Geophysical Monitoring Station (GEMS) will perform for the first time an in-situ investigation of the interior of Mars. With this lander station, Bruce Banerdt from Jet Propulsion Laboratory and his team propose to understand the formation and evolution of terrestrial planets through the study of Mars interior structure, its level of tectonic activity and meteor impact flux. GEMS will carry a seismometer, a self-penetrating mole system to measure the temperature of the interior of Mars, radio tracking device to measure with great precision the dynamic rotation of Mars. The team mentioned in their 2010 Fall AGU conference abstract that they can propose a mission to Mars which fits into the budget of the Discovery program by reusing the Phoenix spacecraft design, its technology and its landing system. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory which also managed the Phoenix mission from Aug. 2007 to Nov. 2008 would be in charge of this mission. The scientific objectives of this mission are ambitious but crucial in the context of the Mars exploration and the understanding of terrestrial planets.

The Titan Mare Explorer (TiME), as portrayed in an artist rendering of the lake lander probe TiME (from Wikipedia), is definitely in my mind the most original mission ever envisioned in the field of planetary science. It all started in 2007-2008 when lakes and seas were discovered in the northern hemisphere of Titan, satellite of Saturn. The chemistry of these lakes, their role in the methane cycle of Titan and the seasonal variability is unknown and will remain unsolved even with the presence of the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn. The TiMeE mission led by Ellen Stofan from Proxemy Research proposes to determine the composition and depth of these seas, their variation over time and their relation with meteorology and the geography of their surrounding. After a launch in January 2015, and a cruise of 7 years, a lander will separate from the spacecraft and "splash" on Ligeia Mare, one of the large Titan seas, for at least 3 months. This first nautical exploration of an extraterrestrial sea could be a unique opportunity to study a place with a methane cycle analogous to Earth's hydrologic cycle. The instrument payload of this mission is not well known. The Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University would manage this pioneer low-cost mission for the outer planet exploration. I am betting that we will know more about the science objectives and the instruments on board this "boat lander" in the future.

The Comet Hopper (Chopper) mission led by Jessica Sunshine from University of Maryland was conceived shortly after images collected by various spacecrafts of Tempel 1, 81P/Wild 2 and 19P/Borelly comet nuclei revealed a great diversity among them but also on each individual body. To understand this heterogeneity the team proposes to study in detail a comet over its full revolution around the sun. The concept was presented at the ACM conference in 2008 and they identified as a target the comet P/2004 R1 (McNaught) with a period of 5.4 years. The spacecraft will "hop" on the small comet nucleus and collect data about its surface composition and properties. Taking advantage of the weak gravity of the comet nucleus, it will be able to go back in orbit (a "sortie" as shown in the figure above) and remains around the nucleus to study as well the cometary coma to understand the link between the surface activity and the cometary activity. Once again, the use of nuclear power source allows the mission to remain active for a long period of time. The NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center would manage this mission. The image to the left depicts the Comet Hopper concept and its ability to land at multiple sites of a comet nucleus.

So that's it. I can anticipate a lot of disappointments in our community. I know several members of proposed missions who spent a lot of time developing their mission concept, putting together a team of researchers and engineers and writing this document. Unfortunately it is not possible to select all these missions. I am not personally involved in any proposed and preselected missions but I had of course my preferences for missions toward asteroids, in particular multiple asteroid systems (asteroids with moons), or toward Io to finally understand the origin and evolution of this exotic volcanism.

On a bright side, the recently revealed decadal survey in planetary science emphasized the need for regular, predictable, and preferable short (≤24 months) cadence for Discovery announcement of opportunity releases and mission selections. If NASA follows this recommendation, in May 2013 I should write a new post on this blog about the preselected missions for Discovery-13. The fun part of this job is that we don't know what scientific and engineering discoveries will be made in the next 2 years. Because the priorities in planetary science can change radically, these Discovery missions are definitely the best way to make great discoveries on emergent research topics.

Congratulations to the preselected teams.

Clear skies.
Franck M. (@AllPlanets)

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I work for a university, which is a large charitable corporation that does a lot of work for the government as well as private industry. I mention its structure because a lot of people think that it is a government institution, which will bear on their emotional response towards what follows. I mention this before the following meditation because I want the reader to be prepared to park their ideological assumptions at the door and read what I write instead of following the narrative that many folks follow when they think about government.

Tell us about yourself.
Hello, my name is Megan, my partner is Ian and we are Plaid Pigeon. Ian and I met and fell in love while living in Southern California. I was immediately drawn to his artistic side and his thoughtfulness when it came to quietly crunching his popcorn in the movie theater. Ian says he fell for my quirky sense of humor and unwavering dedication to giving him back rubs and snuggles. We moved to Austin a little over a year ago, with our dogs Matilda and Rigby. The move was based on our desire for an adventure and soon after, Plaid Pigeon was born. What could be more fun then working together to create a business based on what we enjoy most?

Apart from creating things, what do you do?
One of our favorite things is to explore Austin one restaurant at a time, trying to find the most delicious vegetarian food around. When not eating out, we enjoy taking our dogs for a walk in the park or going for a bike ride. But, most of the time, Ian can be found outdoors in the garden tending our plants. I prefer the comfort of climate controlled quarters and stay inside to knit, crochet or slowly complete my collection of vintage 1950s paint-by-numbers.

What would be the title of your memoir? Why?
We don't know where life is going to take us, but we are loving every moment of it now. Our life together has just begun and it is a little too early for us to be penning a memoir. But, chapter one has been fabulous and we can't wait to see where the story goes.

Where does your inspiration come from?
We both agree that a lot of our inspiration comes from nature, whether it be the transition of one season to the next or simply the beauty found in natural shapes, textures and patterns. We spend a great deal of time sifting through garage sales, swap meets, and junk shops looking for vintage treasures.

What does handmade mean to you?
Calluses, paint stains, splinters, super glued fingers, multiple same-day trips to hardware/craft stores, never being able to find the scissors.

Who has been most influential in your craft?
Ian: For as long as I can remember my dad has had an exceptionally green thumb. Despite all the stresses of raising a large family, my dad managed to find the time to grow the most beautiful garden, year after year. Whether it is in the garden, the garage or in the kitchen, my dad is always working with his hands to create something. It is his "can do" attitude that I admire most.

Megan: My mother has been a huge influence in my life. I grew up with her crafting everything from cuddly quilts, to my favorite knit mittens, and almost all of my Halloween costumes. She even made my high school prom and graduation dresses. She has taught me that with patience, a lot of hard work and a little creativity, anything can be done.

When did you know you were an artist/maker?
Ian: My parents have always been very supportive of my creativity but it wasn't until college that I really became comfortable thinking of myself as an artist. It was around that time that I realized my biggest joys in life were associated with creating.

Megan: I grew up crafting and have always loved to start new projects. But I never seriously considered it more then my favorite pastime. It wasn't until I met Ian that I realized creating could also be a path to my future.

How would you describe your creative process?
Ian: I usually like to develop a small series of work at or around the same time. I'm almost always jumping from one project to another with a general aesthetic in mind. The hope is that the end result is a cohesive body of work with a verity of pieces that compliment each other.

If you could peek inside the studio of any artist, designer or craftsman (dead or alive), who would it be?
We both would have loved to go inside the studio of Margaret Kilgallen. We admire her work and ability of combining craft and fine art.

What handmade possession do you most cherish?
Megan: My most cherished possession is my Gund bear, Gaga, that has rarely left my side since I was few months old. I know, Gund is not handmade, but Gaga is. This was a transition that took place over the years of my childhood, as Gaga fell victim to multiple dog attacks. Again and again, my mother lovingly sewed him back to together. He does not look nearly the same as he did, but I love him that much more for it. Gaga is a constant reminder of my mother's love and an inspiration to what can be accomplished with a needle and thread.

How do you get out of your creative ruts?
When one of us is in a rut, we immediately turn to each other for input and critique. If we are both having an uninspired day, we like to take a break from what we are doing and go play with the dogs. It is amazing what you can see when you come back with fresh eyes.

Where would you like to be in ten years?
We would like to be healthy and happy, living life much as we live it now. Except, we would like our own small house on a large piece of property so we can let our garden grow.

Featured Seller Archive

Location: Folsom, California
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Description:

This position is for a Pre-Sales Digital Field Applications Engineer located in Folsom, California. The selected person will be part of an exciting ever-changing industry and work with customers on leading-edge technologies such as PCI-Express Gen3, USB 3.0, SATA/SAS 3.0, and other high-speed serial links, as well as the latest processor and memory buses.

You will be part of a fast-paced, integrated team including sales, marketing, and R&D. You will play a key role on the field team executing various phases of the sales process including sales plan development, requirements analysis, product demonstrations, benchmarks, and competitive positioning. You will define and recommend appropriate solutions, demonstrate their functionality, and ensure customer success in solving digital design, debug, and validation problems. Over time you will deliver training and consulting related to these applications to further ensure our customers are successful. You will also have a role as customer advocate, influencing both product designs and strategies.

The work is primarily supporting digital-focused products like oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, protocol analyzers, and bit error rate testers.

The ability to continuously learn and adapt new technologies is critical. Demonstrated success in building and maintaining long-term business relationships is essential.

Qualifications:

Position requires Bachelors or Master Degree or equivalent and a minimum of 4yrs+ in an Applications Engineering or Sales Support role.
• Must have knowledge of digital-focused products like oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, protocol analyzers, and bit error rate testers.
• The applicant should understand various technologies, such as PCI-Express Gen3, USB 3.0, SATA/SAS 3.0, and other high-speed serial links, as well as the latest processor and memory buses.
• Candidate must be knowledgeable of competition and able to identify lockout specification (identify Agilent's competitive advantage over competition)
• Must be able to analyze customer requirements and recommend appropriate solutions
• Must possess excellent communication skills
• Must have experience with various phases of the sales process including:
• Feature-by-feature demonstrations
• Benchmarks
• Competitive positioning
• Implementation/execution, (Generally allocated by project and engineering services)
• Assess customer’s problems, recommend solutions and ensure customer satisfaction
• Integrate Agilent products and services (at the system/solutions level) into customer’s environment
• Ensures the product functions per specifications.
• Ensures our system solution platform is functioning properly at the customer site
• Deliver customer training classes and consulting related to our application, as well as assist in pre-sales
• Acts as the customer voice to influence future product design that meets customer needs
• Solves non-routine issues, challenges and problems within field of specialization

Apply to this job

The latest indie pickup from Magnolia's genre arm Magnet Releasing is director Andre Ovredal's TrollHunter (reviews), a found footage film from Norway about a group of three college students who set out to make a documentary about a supposed bear poacher named Hans, only to discover that he's actually been sanctioned by the government to track down and kill the enormous trolls that roam the Norwegian countryside. An engaging film that blends "shaky-cam" style with large-scale special effects, The Troll Hunter releases on VOD May 6th and in limited theaters on June 10th. Check out B-D reporter Chris Eggertsen's exclusive interview with Ovredal inside to get his take on the film's Jurassic Park influence, the buzz-worthy festival run that led to Magnet acquiring it for North American release, and what the future holds in store for him as a director.

The news of legendary Maryland coach Gary Williams' retirement Thursday invoked a wide range of responses from writers, coaches and administrators throughout college basketball. Here's a sampling of some of my favorites:

Dana O'Neil, ESPN.com: He was the same guy when he stalked the sidelines at Woodrow Wilson High School as he was when he paced the court at Maryland, a fiercely competitive, baldly honest and endlessly passionate basketball coach. And that was it -- a basketball coach, a throwback to an era when coaching meant making good players great instead of babysitting great players for a year or two.Williams was never a salesman or a showman or a pitchman or a charlatan. Just a coach, thank you very much, one who walks away after more than 30 years in the business with one national title and another even more difficult-to-achieve milestone -- no blemishes.

John Feinstein, Washington Post: I know he was worn out by a lot of things: 15 years of battling an athletic director who couldn't stand Williams being the face of Maryland sports; the skepticism of his own fans even after he revived a beleaguered program and delivered its only national championship; the complete cesspool high school recruiting has become; and, finally, his most talented player's misguided decision to turn pro rather than return for his junior season. Gary would never put it on any kid, but I suspect Jordan Williams's departure was the last straw. "I told Joe Smith to go; I told Chris Wilcox to go; I told Steve Francis to go," he said a couple of weeks ago. "They were lock lottery picks. Jordan's not."

Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski: "I love Gary. What he has done for Maryland and for college basketball is remarkable. He is one of the great coaches of all-time. He is a coaches' coach and an ultimate competitor. His retirement is a big loss for the ACC and for college basketball."

Jeff Goodman, FoxSports.com: Sure, Williams missed out on no shortage of the local studs. The list is endless: 'Melo, Rudy Gay, Kevin Durant, Ty Lawson, etc. Instead, Williams brought what many considered mediocre talent to College Park and coached them up. He never sold out, instead developing players and, in doing so, proving himself as one of the truly elite X's and O's guys in the business. "Gary wanted guys that were a better fit for him and the program than the best players in the country," Dickerson said. His Terps won 32 games in 2002 and cut down the nets. The best player on that team, Juan Dixon, isn't even in the NBA.

Jay Bilas, ESPN.com: Once, after a questionable call during an NIT game, Williams told an official that his team was playing in the NIT because it wasn't very good. He then proceeded to tell the ref that he was officiating this game for precisely the same reason. No technical was awarded, and both had a good laugh over the jab. That is Gary Williams. Unless you know him, you might not appreciate the quality of the person. Once you do know him, you cannot miss it.

Maryland athletic director Kevin Anderson: "Gary Williams is a legend. His accomplishments on the court have earned him a place among the elite in college basketball history. But Gary's legacy here at Maryland goes far beyond basketball. From his philanthropic efforts to his tireless work with fans and alumni to his impact with our students, Gary has left an indelible mark of excellence on this university."

Mike Wise, Washington Post: Recounted often is how Gary Williams took his alma mater, reeling from tragedy and NCAA probation, to the national title in 2002. What people forget is, he left a very good job at Ohio State to do it, gambling on his future in what many perceived as not a lateral move but an actual step down the coaching ladder. Lefty Driesell's storied program of John Lucas, Buck Williams, Tom McMillen, Len Elmore and Adrian Branch was reduced to rubble after Len Bias, one of the greatest players in the history of college basketball, died in a cocaine overdose on campus less than two days after he was drafted into the NBA. Maryland was floundering after Lefty resigned, and Bob Wade tried to cheat his way back.

Former Maryland athletic director Debbie Yow: "Gary is one of the best X-and-O coaches in college basketball. He will be greatly missed by Terps everywhere. I trust that he will be selected to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame soon. Also, his name should be on the Comcast Center floor, as was proposed a year ago."

Mike DeCourcy, SportingNews.com: The 2002 team was symbolic of both Williams' greatest successes and his greatest struggles; it was the only championship team since the first McDonald's All-American came of age to win the title without one of the game's alumni on the roster. The star players — guards Juan Dixon and Steve Blake, big men Lonny Baxter and Chris Wilcox — had been undervalued by others in the recruiting process. As the assistants who uncovered those gems became head coaches — Billy Hahn, Dave Dickerson, Jimmy Patsos — locating such players became a greater challenge. Recruiting changed, as well, with the rising influence of summer coaches, AAU coaches, club coaches — whatever you want to call them, Gary didn't. Call them, I mean.

Peter Schmuck, Baltimore Sun: Don't misunderstand. Williams owes no one an apology for his decision to get on with his life at 66 years of age. He owes nothing to the university or its basketball fans, who loved his intensity but probably didn't fully appreciate what it took to run a clean program and compete year after year in the elite Atlantic Coast Conference. It's just hard to imagine an evening of Terrapins basketball without Williams sweating through his suit, and it's even harder to understand how Williams decided to walk away after a season in which the Terps missed the NCAA tournament and were snubbed by the National Invitation Tournament. He always struck me as a go-out-on-top kind of guy.

I've had the BlackBerry PlayBook for nearly two weeks now. Although we don't typically review gadgets and hardware here at ReadWriteWeb, RIM was able to send us a review unit. Below are some initial impressions and thoughts, but for a more detailed review, you should head to the gadget blog of your choice, if you haven't done so already.

The PlayBook is, in a word, serviceable. It is not a nightmare, but it's not incredible, either. However, it shows potential. It's surprisingly heavy for its small, 7-inch size. It needs apps, badly. It needs core apps, including email, calendaring and contacts at the very least, because webmail doesn't seem work properly. It needs to be less buggy, in general. But the PlayBook is rapidly improving. Although in the short term, it's an unfinished product, perhaps undeserving of a full review, and possibly even undeserving of your money as of yet - that situation is changing quickly. How quickly? RIM is currently promising PlayBook updates as often as every two weeks.

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Hoping for Better of the Gate

One the day of the PlayBook's arrival, I have a confession to make: I wanted to like the thing. I still have a soft spot in my heart for RIM, the BlackBerry maker, whose BlackBerry Pearl was my first real smartphone. I loved the Pearl. It taught me the value (and the addictiveness), of the always-on world. I was truly mobile at last. I was connected! I discovered a world beyond the clamshell feature phones I had toted for years prior. I hacked the phone to make the pearl change colors. I installed apps. I twittered!

And I used the Pearl to death, until the iPhone launched and the world changed. The iPhone, or specifically, the iPhone 3G (I had to save up, times were tough) was my next phone. I never used a BlackBerry since, but I have moved on to Android and even Windows Phone in recent months.

I realize that confessing a desire to like the PlayBook is not the objective journalist's take, but what can I tell you? I grew up a blogger.

Unfortunately, the PlayBook didn't immediately inspire feelings of awe or devotion, the way the Pearl once did. Its operating system (QNX) is quite nice, but nice only takes you so far these days. RIM, sadly, seems to have lost its mojo lately. It's not even in IDC's ranking of the top 5 worldwide phone manufacturers these days - it has been lumped into the "Others" category.

Can the PlayBook change that?

So Much Riding on PlayBook

But RIM has seen the writing on the wall, and it's doing...well, what it's doing is the PlayBook.

It's an odd experience to hold the PlayBook in your hands. It's a turning point for RIM, and either the beginning of the end for RIM or the beginning of its future. The company has dominated the smartphone industry for years It has sold 150 million smartphones, 14.9 million of which were sold last quarter and it still plans to ship around 13 or so million smartphones in its upcoming May quarter. Sales at RIM are higher year-over-year, but its OS market share percentage continues to fall.

The PlayBook, as a tablet, is not just an iPad competitor, it's a back door to selling BlackBerry phones and servers. Its most notable differentiating feature is called BlackBerry Bridge, and it allows users to tether the PlayBook to their BlackBerry phone in order to access email, contacts and calendaring. Untether it, and the content is gone. This is a feature designed with the enterprise in mind, and it's a good one in that sense. Security conscious businesses will be more likely to allow tablet computers onto their network knowing that confidential content isn't stored on the device.

Consumers, however, will have to wait for access to core applications like email and contacts - those will ship via a software update later this summer, says RIM. Clearly, consumers are a second priority for RIM when it comes to the PlayBook.

But while some have said that comparing the PlayBook to the iPad makes no sense, I think the comparisons are necessary. I don't think a company can expect to launch a tablet anything, and not be compared with the market leader, for starters. More philosophically, I think the world is changing, even, very slowly, in the enterprise, under the influence of Apple, Google and others who are bringing the "consumerization" of technology to corporate end users. The CEO demands that I.T. support his iPhone, and it's all downhill from there. Small groups are sharing data on Google Sites, disgruntled employees are tweeting company secrets, sales professionals are friending clients on Facebook. The consumer world and the enterprise have merged, and RIM would do best to keep that in mind when it comes to the PlayBook. Consumers should never be second, they should be equal, if not first.

Apple showed the world that technology can be accessible, and now the world expects accessible technology. In that regard, I don't think RIM has entirely succeeded.

First Impressions, Software and Hardware

The user interface for the PlayBook involves menus at the top (pull down, via swipe) and access to navigation at the bottom (swipe up for an interface that lets you switch between apps). This is not quite as intuitive as with the iPad and the its simple, one-button interface. The slightly upped complexity is evidenced by the tutorial on "how to use the PlayBook" which loads during the PlayBook's setup.

That's not to say the interface can't be learned, it just takes a minute. Someone may have to explain it to you. Meanwhile, my daughter, not yet two, can use an iPad. She pushes the button, and says "bye-bye." The app is gone. That's simplicity.

Once the learning curve is out of the way, and again, it's only momentary, the OS itself is actually enjoyable to use. From the home screen, you can flip through open apps, and view their large, oversized live thumbnails which keeps them easily viewable. The tablet supports multi-tasking, so you can listen to music while surfing the Web, for example. There are notifications at the top of the screen, which is handy. Overall, the operating system runs well, and seems fast and responsive, for the most part. I did run into an issue twice where the PlayBook stopped responding altogether, and wouldn't even reboot. For several minutes, it was completely locked up. I have not had a reappearance of this problem since the latest software update, however, so I assume this bug has been fixed.

Unlike on Android and Windows Phone devices, there is no dedicated, universal "back" button. This is frustrating at times, but it may be a worse problem for those who are used to its existence on their devices (i.e. Android users) than for those who don't expect one (i.e. iPhone users).

Then there is the hardware. I like the grippy, rubbery back, but for a tiny tablet, it's rather heavy. The 7-inch PlayBook is supposedly .9 lbs to the iPad's 1.5, but it still felt like a brick in my purse. In return for giving up all that screen real estate, you would think the thing would feel more like a heavy phone than a tablet, but that's not the case.

The power button's size and protuberance is a joke. The button is tiny, and must be pressed with a fingernail, practically. On newer hardware, RIM seems to have slightly raised the button after a number of complaints, but it's still very small. We wouldn't be surprised to see a next-generation PlayBook one day that changes this design altogether. It's that bad.

Apps and Services

The PlayBook also has front and back cameras, but no built-in photo-sharing features. It has video capabilities, but no Skype. RIM did, however, launch its own video chat app just this week which works over Wi-Fi.

The PlayBook has a media player, but no iTunes-like store where you can purchase or rent TV shows or movies. However, through a partnership with 7Digital, there is a music store on the device. And it has some apps that deliver video content, like VEVO's music video app, for example, due to arrive soon.

Also missing on the PlayBook: official Twitter and Foursquare apps (Facebook was added this week), and pretty much every other app you think of as in your "default set" you expect when you change platforms, from Amazon to Yelp.

Microsoft, for what it's worth, understood the importance of this and made great efforts to attract developers to build for its Windows Phone platform, now approaching 12,000 applications. It even paid developers to port apps to Windows Phone. The PlayBook has some 3,000 apps today, according to RIM. It will soon support Android apps, too, but it still won't be full Android Market access - developers will have to repackage their Android apps and submit them again to BlackBerry App World.

Android app support is probably RIM's riskiest move for its tablet, and will either end up being a brilliant one, or a monumental mistake.

RIM is also actively courting developers to build for the PlayBook, we've heard, but not with cash like Microsoft did. That said, there are some high-profile apps on the tablet's "upcoming" list, including Rovio's Angry Birds and Amazon's Kindle, to name a couple.

Who Needs Apps? We Have the Real Web

But what about the Web? After all, with the promise of the "real" Web, Flash and all on the PlayBook, isn't the Web surfing experience worth it? Well, no, not yet. Not only has the browser become unresponsive at times, forcing me to shut off Wi-Fi and turn it back on in order to resolve the situation, websites themselves didn't function as I thought they would. For example, in the mobile view of Gmail's webmail interface (which I prefer on smaller screens), I couldn't check the checkboxes to Archive or Delete mail en masse very easily. When I finally got them checked, the Archive and Delete buttons didn't work at all. It's hard to be sure where to point the finger on this one - has Google done something to ensure that, outside of Android and iPhone, this mobile view doesn't work properly? After all, an HTML5-ready Web browser shouldn't have issues here, right? Or is this a failure on RIM's part somehow? As a consumer, the answer is "I don't care," however. I just want it to work.

Also, despite having support for Flash, YouTube videos wouldn't play on YouTube.com for me  - there was just a giant exclamation mark where the video should be. I had to use the dedicated YouTube app. This is not how it was supposed to work, but it's indicative of the bugginess present in this first-gen device. A subsequent software update resolved this issue, but it was troubling for some time.

Finally, the PlayBook defaults to the desktop view for webpages, which is supposed to be a great feature. Unfortunately, the mobile view sometimes would work better - the screen just isn't that big. But how can you switch to a mobile view when the site in question doesn't know to provide you the option? You have to actually know the URL. Is it m. or /mobile or what? Better make a list and add those sites to your favorites. We would love to see RIM implement a toggle switch in its browser settings that let you switch between the mobile and desktop views for a Web page, if at all possible, in order to make the choice ourselves, as the need arose.

Will Parents and Kids Like the PlayBook?

Because I was curious about the consumer angle of the PlayBook, I handed it over to some kids I know. They didn't love it, it seemed. This is almost entirely due to the fact that there are very few apps available for the PlayBook at present and fewer still that are within a mom's budget, (aka "free" to $0.99-$1.99). Within less than half an hour, the tablet was set aside for a yo-yo, a puppet and a Nintendo DS, respectively, among my three young, unknowing beta testers.

Ironically, it was only a year ago, April 2010 in fact, after the iPad's launch, that I took the new tablet to a family gathering over Easter where it was in use all day long. I never got my hands on my iPad again that day. The point is, it's not longer impressive just to be a tablet, you need to have content. It's not simply a box to check, as RIM's CEO would have you believe. It's everything.

Have $500? Need a Tablet Now? Buy an iPad. Saving Up? Check Back on PlayBook Later

The PlayBook, while offering a great OS with a lot of potential, just does not have enough content yet. It's an unfinished device with an unknown future. It's a risky purchase for a consumer. How well will the core apps work when they do ship later this summer? Will RIM ever have a movie and media store with enough selection to keep you entertained? Will it get Netflix or Hulu? Will the PlayBook ever gain enough traction to attract great developers? Will the big names in apps ever arrive? How well will those Android apps really run? How many will arrive?

There's too much unknown about the PlayBook as it is today. The one thing we do know: for $500, you'll get a lot more for your money with an iPad 2. In a few months time, that will likely still be the case, but the PlayBook reviewed above will be an entirely different device by then, and one that may be ready for your consideration.

Discuss

With a gift for assembly and an eye for color, Elizabeth has a fresh perspective and keen sense of style, which has made the Elizabeth Demos design studio one of the most sought after companies in the South. Referring to herself as, "an old fashioned girl in a modern world" Elizabeth has a knack for refreshing traditions with her modern take on vintage. With an incredible design career that includes event design along with a successful career in the publishing world, Elizabeth has a unique set of skills that have contributed to her success. Her work has appeared in the pages of Weddings Unveiled along with Real Wedding features on Completely Unveiled. Read on to more about the talented Elizabeth Demos and what inspires her design.

Elizabeth Demos is based in Savannah, GA. To contact Elizabeth Demos, visit the company website by clicking here or call 912.308.4435.

Weddings Unveiled: How did you become a wedding and event designer? When and how did you begin Elizabeth Demos?

Elizabeth Demos: I truly fell into both the photo styling and event design careers. In 2003 I was discovered by an editor from Better Homes and Gardens magazine while running my store, @home vintage general. He took me under his wing and let me explore the production and photo styling world while working as a freelancer. Once that first door opens you can move around freely if you have a great work ethic, talent and people like you. I have a pretty long-standing track record with all of the publications I have worked with and maintain good contacts with all of them. As for weddings, in the spring of 2009 I planned and designed a wedding for one of my former @home shop girls and quickly realized it was a career tailor made for me. It incorporated all that I love about photo styling and being creative with my management skills (acquired during the 10+ years in retail). In 2010 I closed my shop to pursue both careers simultaneously. Yes, I’m a workhorse, but I love the challenge both careers provide and not surprisingly each influence the other nicely.

WU: Tell us about how you work with engaged couples, whether as a team or individually.

ED: I love to meet both the bride and groom but understandably I often meet the bride first (with their mom or best friend). My first consultation feels a bit like a job interview. I consider it a getting to know you session and they can get to know me too. I explain my background; talk logistics, chat about my creative skills and then we talk “vision”. After all I’m a visual girl and when we can talk about the aesthetics I get really jazzed. From that usually lengthy first meeting I develop a plan for the look and feel of the wedding, I create a budget, plot the timeline and make a list of recommended vendors specifically selected for the couple, I schedule meetings with vendors and arrange site visits. Most of this phase is logistics but the fun stuff is never far from my mind, it often directs the site selection and most definitely the vendor selection.

WU: Describe your wedding style.

ED: I think my style is a modern take on vintage. It is how I design houses, style photo shoots and now it all translates to events. I ADORE antiques and vintage finds and incorporate them into everything I do. I’m an old fashioned girl in a modern world so refreshing traditions is my expertise.

WU: What inspires you?

ED: Color, texture, nature, places, people, photography, antiques, vintage wares, interior design.

WU: How do you keep your ideas fresh?

ED: I think because I’m a very recent addition to the wedding industry my things come across as fresh. I’m driven by what I see in the editorial world and in interior design not by what I see in the wedding industry. A long time ago I watched an interview with Marlo Thomas and the interviewer asked her about her father’s support of her career and she shared his wisdom; “I raised you to be a thoroughbred. When thoroughbreds run they wear blinders the keep their eyes focused straight ahead with no distractions, no other horses. They hear the crowd but they don’t listen. They just run their own race.” After I listened to her explain what her father had told her I thought to myself, that is how I operate, I don’t really pay attention to what other people are doing, I just do what I do and hope that is it comes across as fresh. My motto has and always will be “be yourself.”

WU: What was your favorite wedding and why?

ED: Oh no, I can’t really say. I love aspects of all of them. Let’s just say my favorite wedding is the next wedding because I haven’t totally created it yet.

WU: What makes Elizabeth Demos different from other wedding and event designers?

ED: I’m a photo stylist so my clients always walk away with a complete vision, a complete thought and killer pictures.

WU: What would be your ideal wedding assignment or dream wedding to design?

ED: Not sure, I have really felt that each of the weddings I have created have been “the ideal assignment” until the next one rolls around and then I think, no, it is this one. I’m guilty of having CADD (creative attention deficit disorder) and asset if you ask me.

But then again, there is the one that got away, a friend decided to elope instead of have the wedding. I had already planned the whole thing in my head. It was to be a tram wedding on the top of a snow covered mountain in Wyoming, 40 close family and friends would ride up in a tram stand at the top of the mountain and witness the ceremony, share a cocktail and travel back down to enjoy a reception. Simple really, but so sweet. I like little weddings.

Anyway she is in Hawaii right now (literally) getting hitched and I’m happy for her but sad to have never planned that sweet little wedding in my head. Oh, the letterpress invites were going to be so cute……………. (are you reading this Kelly B?)

WU: Tell us three things you can't live without.

ED: My family. My eyes. My ambition.

WU: What is the best advice anyone has ever given you?

ED: You get what you give.

WU: What is the best advice you can give to an engaged couple?

ED: At the end of the day the real purpose is to be married. The process should be enjoyable and stress free. Breath.

WU: What does the future hold for Elizabeth Demos? Are you working on any upcoming projects?

ED: The near future involves many days and nights editing photographs, creating DIY projects and writing the final chapters for my upcoming book all about weddings. I'm over the moon with excitement about it and can't wait to share more when it is released next year (publisher, Chronicle Books). As always I continue to produce and style features for magazines, blogs and design and plan beautiful weddings. I'm a busy and very lucky girl.

Forgive me for simply laying out a sequence of random thoughts (on a single theme) that occurred to me a few hours ago, as I was swimming around in my morning cistern of coffee; but it seems to be all Im fit for just at the moment.

I remembered this morning that, a few weeks ago, I happened to mention here that I thought Max Beerbohms Enoch Soames," from his collection Seven Men, to be maybe the most amusing short story in English. If you have never read it (and, for that matter, even if you have), it is the tale of how an utterly talentless fin de siècle British poet" who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a quick journey one-hundred years into the future, to the reading room of the British Museum, where he hopes to find that his writings have at last been granted the appreciation denied them in his own time.

Every scene in the story is hilarious. My favorite is probably Beerbohms account of his first conversation with Soames, and my favorite exchange in that conversation is this:

     Of the older men," as he called them, he seemed to like only Milton. Milton," he said, wasnt sentimental." Also, Milton had a dark insight." And again, I can always read Milton in the reading-room."
     The reading-room?"
     Of the British Museum. I go there every day."
     You do? Ive only been there once. Im afraid I found it rather a depressing place. It-it seemed to sap ones vitality."
      It does. Thats why I go there. The lower ones vitality, the more sensitive one is to great art. I live near the museum. I have rooms in Dyott Street."
     And you go round to the reading-room to read Milton?"
     Usually Milton." He looked at me. It was Milton," he certificatively added, who converted me to diabolism."
      Diabolism? Oh, yes? Really?" said I, with that vague discomfort and that intense desire to be polite which one feels when a man speaks of his own religion. You-worship the devil?"
     Soames shook his head.
      Its not exactly worship," he qualified, sipping his absinthe. Its more a matter of trusting and encouraging."
     I see, yes. I had rather gathered from the preface to 'Negations that you were a-a Catholic."
      Je letais a cette époque. In fact, I still am. I am a Catholic diabolist."

Anyway, thinking about the story again this morning reminded me that my eldest brother wrote a rather darkly satirical novella last year, principally for his own amusement and enlightenment, called Confessions of the Antichrist. It is the first-person narrative of a man who discovers late in a very successful life that he has been chosen by the devil to play the role of the Great Beast.

When he wrote it, my brother had gone through the wars, so to speak, spiritual and emotional, and it has a wry, nightmarish intensity to it, run through by deep veins of both withering cynicism and luminous faith, that I found fascinating and rather disturbing.

I can imagine how some readers might take offense at some aspects of the story (the devil presents himself as a Catholic cardinal, for instance), but only if they forget that they are reading an intentionally fantastic fable. In the end, the tale is about spiritual temptation, institutional corruption, and the frequent incompatibility of Christian faith and pragmatic" obligations.

In any event, my brother did not publish the book in print, but an acquaintance prevailed upon him to make a Kindle edition available , and so-if you care to-you can see what I mean for yourself.

Thinking of that, moreover, reminded me that, about six years ago, I too wrote a novella with a devil in it. (Let me emphasize: not the devil, but only a devil.) That tale is in fact supposed to appear in print, along with some other pieces, later this year, or thereabouts. It is more sedate than my brothers story and not nearly as entertaining as Beerbohms. But I can say of my devil that he is, to my mind, a very gifted raconteur.

And thinking about all of these things reminded me of a conversation I had, not long ago, with my friend the inimitable Ambrose dArcangeli (what a marvelous name that man has) about literary depictions of Satan, and how attractive, witty, glamorous, or appealing they often make the devil seem.

I doubt hes even very interesting," Ambrose observed. I mean, to the extent that the devil has any personality to speak of at all-even if the story is true and he was once an archangel or something of that sort-he must by now be a pretty sordid, unimaginative, and dreary little fellow. He would have to be so monstrously self-absorbed: not a brilliant conversationalist, not a philosopher and wit, not a bon-vivant or perverted aesthete, but just some tedious little troll, full of spite and resentment. Hes probably a monomaniac who talks about nothing but his personal grievances and aims, and in the bluntest, most unrefined language imaginable-the sort of person you try your best to get away from at a party."

Ambrose was right, of course. It is an old and delicate problem: How is any artist to make the diabolical appear diabolical without producing something merely boring and repellant? I made the rather trite observation that the supreme triumph or failure in this regard (depending how one sees the matter) is, of course, Miltons. His Satan appears at the beginning of Paradise Lost as a kind of Prometheus, so dauntlessly defiant of heavens laws that his damnation seems at first immeasurably more exhilarating than the staid beatitude of Miltons heaven.

The effect is so startling that many have concurred with Blakes verdict in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (though usually without Blakes irony): The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it!" True, as has often been pointed out, our last glimpses of Satan in the epic are in the forms of a toad and a serpent, but that is not how we tend to remember him. All readers of the poem recall his magnificent entrance onto the stage; few recall his final exit.

But even the post-Promethean, post-Romantic Satan is too engaging a character, too debonair" Ambrose continued. Dostoevskys devil in The Brothers Karamazov, for example, the one who appears to the fever-ridden Vanya, is a bit of an invertebrate and a sponge, who goes about in the threadbare guise of a member of the impoverished petty nobility; but hes still an enchanting talker, with a sense of humor, and considerable urbanity. If nothing else, writers always imagine the devil as well-read and something of a cosmopolitan, whos able to explain himself in terms of one or another perfectly coherent moral philosophy. But, of course, the devil is really just a thug."

I had to admit that it would be rather unlikely that the devil would have retained any sense of style after so many countless millennia in such squalidly reduced circumstances. Perhaps at first, remembering the glorious raiments that adorned his limbs when he walked among the sons of God in the stones of fire, Samael or Hillel ben Shahar or Lucifer (call him what you will) might have made an effort to keep up appearances, and played the part of the dandy, and squandered his resources on well tailored suits, and spent hours a day posing before his pier glass.

But by now, surely, like all those children of privilege who lose everything irretrievably, he must have gone entirely to seed, and resigned himself to shapeless polyester-cotton blends and plastic shoes. How then, I asked Ambrose, should one portray the prince of darkness?

After a pensive moment, Ambrose replied, A merciless real estate developer whose largest projects are all casinos."

And recalling this exchange brought Donald Trump to mind. You know the fellow: developer, speculator, television personality, hotelier, political dilettante, conspiracy theorist, and grand croupier-the one with that canopy of hennaed hair jutting out over his eyes like a shelf of limestone.

In particular, I recalled how, back in 1993, when Trump decided he wanted to build special limousine parking lots around his Atlantic City casino and hotel, he had used all his influence to get the state of New Jersey to steal the home of an elderly widow named Vera Coking by declaring eminent domain" over her property, as well as over a nearby pawn shop and a small family-run Italian restaurant.

She had declined to sell, having lived there for thirty-five years. Moreover, the state offered her only one-fourth what she had been offered for the same house some years before, and Trump would then buy it at a bargain rate. The affair involved the poor woman in an exhausting legal battle, which, happily, she won, with the assistance of the Institute for Justice.

How obvious it seems to me now. Cold, grasping, bleak, graceless, and dull; unctuous, sleek, pitiless, and crass; a pallid vulgarian floating through life on clouds of acrid cologne and trailed by a vanguard of fawning divorce lawyers, the devil is probably eerily similar to Donald Trump-though perhaps just a little nicer.

David Bentley Hart is contributing editor of First Things. His most recent book is Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale University Press). His other On the Square" articles can be found here. His brother Addison's Confessions of the Anti-Christ can be ordered here.

The first week in May marked a momentous announcement from "the president of the free world": their number-one nemesis had been killed.

Perhaps the spontaneity of some of the celebrations in Washington and other US cities took the administration by surprise. There is only one death that is so widely celebrated in the West. For the United States of America, this mission is most momentous.

A reveller dressed as "Captain America" celebrates the killing of bin Laden (courtesy of Der Spiegel)


The first announcement by president Obama seemed sombre and reflective, projecting an impression of closure and an opportunity for conciliation, "we will never be at war with Islam" he said. Osama Bin Laden was "not an Islamic leader".

Picking on the hints of conciliation, Muslim leaders all over the world put the issue of the world's most-wanted man aside and opted to welcome the opportunity for conciliation. There was not one word of praise for bin Laden or grief over his death from any credible Muslim leader anywhere. We thought that this would mean the end of US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, that Obama's next announcement would be "mission accomplished" and it is time to resume our friendship.

However, the first deflating comment I noted from our Prime Minister right here in Australia, gave the impression that she missed the conciliatory tone of president Obama, opting rather to maintain the fear-alert by her promise to stay the course in Afghanistan and alarming the population about increased risk of a terror attack.

Then the confused conflicting messages started to emerge, the Pakistani government was quick to deny any involvement or knowledge in the operation that led to the killing. They even denied any knowledge that bin Laden might have been living in Pakistan. The US did not take long to corroborate the denial with an allegation that Pakistan is untrustworthy and if they had told them they might have jeopardised the operation. Not to be outdone, India also ignored the potential for conciliation, perhaps in pursuit of some US brownie points, India's home minister immediately charged Pakistan with being a haven for terrorists. In a coincidence mired in irony, the day that the German Der Spiegel questioned the legality of the operation we received the announcement that the US was suing the Deutsche Bank over mortgage fraud.

Nothing in our world happens in a vacuum!

The comedy of errors continued with president Obama's chief counterterrorism advisor at first charging "bin Laden" with trying to use his wife as a human shield only to be contradicted later by the statement that "bin Laden" was unarmed but tried to resist and she was not his wife, but his aide's wife caught in the crossfire even though only the Navy Seals were firing and "bin Laden" had no weapons! The latest revision of the story says that the room had several weapons and they shot at him as he tried to reach for one, or seemed to be reaching for one! It goes on, the son who was killed was not Hamza as first thought but Khaled! Hang on, let us make sure we get it right, it was Khalid not Hamza. Make sure that you get those details, they must add up to something?

Then that telling short video from the White House observation room, the president of the free world looks like he is biting his nails, Hilary Clinton holding a weight of worries on her brows and the rest of the talent in the room, visions that could provide the posters for the inevitable Hollywood production of these nail gripping events described by the president’s chief counter terrorism advisor John Brennan as "probably the most anxiety-filled periods of times".

They say that they respected Muslim tradition by washing the body and seeking to bury it quickly only to then dump it into the sea. Oh what secrets lie beneath thine waves!

To try to make a little more sense of what is happening, one needs to go back in time a few weeks, in March of this year, Reuters reported US Attorney General Eric Holder telling a house panel that "Osama bin laden would never appear in a US court room". This led to speculation that either bin Laden is already dead or would soon be. Various writers have speculated that bin Laden has been dead for some time, for example, in his book Messages to the World: the Statements of Osama bin Laden, Bruce Lawrence presented a compelling argument that bin Laden had been dead since 2004. Others have suspected that he had been dead or killed earlier, possibly in the 2001attacks on Tora Bora. David Ray Griffin in his book Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive provides other compelling arguments that bin Laden died of kidney failure in December ‘01, just a few months after the September 11 attacks. If he was not already dead, Holder's statement meant they had discovered his whereabouts and made a decision to kill him and that they soon would. Though such certainty raises more questions.

For an empire that has suffered great moral and financial losses in Iraq and Afghanistan, the "death" of bin Laden provided that pivotal point from which they can announce a face-saving withdrawal of troops and divert the resources to much-needed facilities and services at home.

For Muslims, torn between the conflicting stories about bin Laden, all we wanted was for the enigma to be put to rest. To us, all the stories about bin Laden painted a picture of our faith that was alien to anything that we knew and cherished. He has been presented as a leader who would stop at nothing to achieve his plans of domination. The enigma drew some to his cause. However, the trickle of individuals who heeded his call were being arrested and he was left with a very small following, perhaps tens of people, perhaps less. They were the remnants of those idealists who came to Afghanistan to help save its people from Soviet occupation, they were trained and equipped by the United States in its hope to tear down Soviet power and limit its influence.

That plan worked too well. The resulting the hubris may have been a key factor in developing the false perception that it can invade, occupy and dominate the resources of countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. They forgot one important element, the Afghan Mujahideen and their foreign friends were fighting a war of liberation whereas the US campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan were campaigns of occupation. They forgot the lessons from history that no people, no society would ever acquiesce to foreign occupation. As the great Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, said: "now that they have achieved their goal, they should pack up and leave".

Muslims are relieved that the West no longer has to beat the drums of war after a "Muslim" bogeyman. We have four views with respect to bin Laden, all these views pour into the same end result.

1) He was a crusader for his own worldview and died with the Arab spring revolution, long before the Navy Seals killed the actual person. Those who sympathised with him would view him as a martyr dying at the hands of his enemies and those who didn't would be rather indifferent. For those who view him as a martyr, from the Islamic perspective, they view martyrdom for a cause as a noble aspiration which had been achieved by its seeker, they would not begrudge him that fate, rather, they would celebrate it and draw comfort from the verse that says: Nay, they are alive, with their Lord, well provided for.

2) He never stopped working for the CIA who trained and equipped him to help defeat the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and that the US wanted to put an end to the enigma and they have given him a new identity and killed off his character, like producers do for a television series. In which case, we are all being manipulated as is the strategy of governments.

3) He died a while ago and the US only saw fit to make a "convincing" announcement this week because there are no longer any strategic gains from keeping his myth alive.

4) He is still in hiding, the US didn't kill him, we will hear of bin Laden "sightings" in the future. However, as the publicity around his death has been so profuse, no-one is going to believe that he lives, he will not want to come out because he knows that they will go after him so his character is killed off just like in point 2.

Under all four scenarios, we need to all view this very difficult period in our lives as over. For those brothers and sisters who were antagonistic or indifferent to Osama bin Laden or those who believed that he was genuine, maybe we can put our different opinions aside and see if we can bring some semblance of unity into our community. Our mission as peacemakers, do-gooders and disseminators of goodwill compels us to look for opportunities and signals to do just that.

The baggage that had been associated with the bin Laden persona which we have been forced to carry has been delivered; let us move on, our work is just beginning.

There is a golden opportunity for the US and the Western world. Seeing the conciliatory reaction from the Muslim world to their operation against bin Laden, the US must receive those Muslims’ hands that have been stretched in the spirit of conciliation and seek a future of cooperation and collaboration on the premise of mutual respect. The estimated 1.6 to 2 billion Muslims around the world are showing signs of goodwill, will the Western world reciprocate?

On another note: A number of countries in the Muslim world have witnessed peaceful and not-so-peaceful revolutions. Whilst these revolutions were taking place, supporters rallied the world over to give them moral support and lobby on their behalf. I thank all those who have supported the oppressed in their march towards freedom. At the same time, I appeal to them to research their audience and select slogans that make sense, slogans that get the message across to the people who witness their demonstrations. In a secular society, chanting that a certain despot should be ousted because he is an enemy of God or religion is really counter-productive and neither conveys the intended message nor wins people over. This is especially so when the chant is in a foreign language. What does it mean when an Australian says: we will give our blood and soul for a foreign country (even if it is the country of his parents)? These become meaningless or negative slogans chanted because we have not applied our minds to develop the message that we need to develop for our audiences. Such chants give the impression that we were not thinking, that we focused on the activity but not on the message, that we started on a journey but lost ourselves on the way choosing a detour that would not deliver us to our destination. Please my dear brothers and sisters, instead of shouting ‘Down down’ whatever, or so-and-so is an ‘enemy of God’, or ‘our blood and soul’ for such-and-such a country or some other counterproductive slogans that were only selected for rhyme rather than reason, we should put a little more effort and select slogans that convey to those who hear them exactly what we want to convey in a manner that they will understand.

Finally, as we hear that the International Criminal Court is about to issue warrants for senior leaders in Libya, very disturbing news is coming out of Egypt that possibly as many as 50,000 individuals have faced military trials without due process. This is a terrible outcome when the Egyptian people showed so much confidence in and gave so much praise for their military. Whatever counter revolutionary forces are influencing these show trials (and the alleged associated tortures), the Egyptian military must as a matter of absolute urgency hand over these cases to the civilian judiciary and the people be assumed innocent until proven otherwise.

Keysar Trad is founder of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia.

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At 14 he seemed so innocent. Yet these gentle, beatific looks are what made him so charismatic – and dangerous – in later life

Of all the known photographs of Osama bin Laden it is a happy, innocent, sociable picture of a group of teenagers, taken in Sweden in 1971, that has haunted news reports of his death this week. The 14-year-old Osama, smiling in a young, vulnerable way, stands second from right. The photograph in all its brittle colour glory is genuinely fascinating. In the green jumper stands Bin Laden before Bin Laden, a boy whose destiny you cannot conceivably read in his face. Next to the images in our imaginations of falling towers, of lower Manhattan swallowed in deathly dust, of flames in the sky eating away so many lives – the images of the new reality he made – it is eerily ordinary, perversely promising.

Perhaps it suggests the innocence of the world before 9/11, as well as the enigmatic life of Osama bin Laden himself. The pink Cadillac, the flares, the hair and a hat all place it unmistakably in the world of 1971. Who knows, perhaps this scene will soon be recreated in a darkly ironic biopic, for the Boogie Nights look is so flavoursome. I was five when it was taken. My generation was lucky enough to see the last years of what the historian Eric Hobsbawm called the "golden age" of peace and prosperity for westerners after 1945. Better still, we saw the end of the cold war and a brief moment when a Democratic president and a New Labour government led a society whose main problem in the future looked like it might be choosing whether to lounge in Starbucks or visit an art gallery.

Any idea of a golden age, a bright new century, or the simple certainty that our democracies will survive was destroyed on that day in September 2001, by the insecurely smiling boy in the photograph.

But if this is the appeal of the image, it is illusory. The fascination of the picture relies on a contrast between the "ordinary" youth we seem to see here and the monster who was responsible for al-Qaida. Yet that would imply that later images of Bin Laden show him as a scary, deranged, inhuman terrorist. I have yet to see a photo that makes him look like that. Perhaps the CIA will find repulsive pictures of him doing bad things now that he is dead, but all the currently available photographs are of a man soft and almost feminine in his features, with gentle, even mystical, eyes. "The child is father of the man" – Wordsworth's lines apply. For there is no contrast between this photograph of the teenage Bin Laden and pictures of him as an adult. No sickness, no break in his life, no withdrawal from reality – he seems as natural in later portraits as he does here, with insecurity replaced by beatific calm.

It was a saint, not a devil, who killed so many. To his followers around the world "the Sheikh" was a guru, a sage, a man of wisdom. He called for megadeaths with the charisma of a benevolent visionary. Why else did doctors heed his call in Britain? This photograph in fact gives the lie to those who belittle Bin Laden's influence, or see him as some postmodern construct of western narratives of good and evil. For in its ordinariness it shows what made him extraordinary – out of this promising young man grew the illusion of moral authority that contradicted every stereotype of the terrorist as a pitiful, unattractive outsider. Osama bin Laden was the real thing, a leader, and that is why his death is such a necessary murder.

My thanks to John Quiggin for plugging my new book on his blog, and apologies for taking so long to reply. John admits he hasn't read the book, and then takes issue with a claim on the jacket that 'the benign and comfortable world that has allowed Australia to be safe and prosperous is vanishing quickly'. He goes on to argue that over the past few years, the threats to Australia have lessened.

This is precisely the point I make in 'There Goes the Neighbourhood'. I argue in Chapter 5 that 'practically every international issue that really worried Australians at some stage over the past 60 years has seemed to simply fade away without even a whimper' – resurgent Japanese militarism, communism, American isolationism, the Yellow Peril, terrorism, the Soviet navy. But the point of my argument is that the world that has given Australia such a benign neighbourhood is coming to an end.

Quiggin issues a challenge that unless someone 'can point to something I've missed, I'm going back to sleep'. Well, here goes. In a nutshell, five big changes should give us serious pause for thought:

1. The unprecedented rise of the world's only two continent-sized economies, at approximately the same time. We can already feel their gravitational effect, and the future will see us ever more tightly bound into their economic dynamics. Their increasing influence and centrality will mean that our world and our choices are more and more shaped by the preferences of countries that see the world differently to how we see it, and less and less shaped by the preferences of countries that think like we think.

2. In a political sense, these will be very different great powers. All other great powers have been rich; India and China, even when they are the largest and third largest economies in the world, will still be poor in per capita terms. The combination of power and poverty will ensure they have very different priorities from other leading countries, and this will affect the prospects for meaningful collective action on everything from climate change to global financial instability to nuclear proliferation, to energy, food and water security.

3. The continent of Asia, from the Gulf in the west to Japan in the east, is integrating further and faster than ever before. East Asia's trade with the rest of Asia grew by six and a quarter times between 1990 and 2007, compared with just a three and a quarter-fold increase in cross-Pacific trade over the same period. The Asia Pacific era has ended and been replaced by the century of the Indo-Pacific, where the coastlines and waterways to our immediate north and west are going to be the primary arena for the patterns of competition and collusion among the great powers.

The real estate we occupy will be a valuable prize for any great power than can draw Australia into its orbit and away from the others'.

4. We're witnessing an increasing blurring of security and prosperity interests. The world we've become used to was one in which countries traded and invested primarily with their allies or friendly countries, and not their rivals. Now Australia joins Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and a range of other countries that have the US as their major security partner and its great rival China as their major economic partner. Even the two great competitors, China and America, are deeply economically dependent on each other.

This is a world of agonising choices – a world of rivalrous interdependence in which our choices as a society will be closely watched by much more powerful countries.

5. A world of rivalrous interdependence is not one in which matters can be decided by momentous confrontations. It will be a world in which each country has to balance a range of different interests and offsetting partnerships. The incentive for powerful countries will be to attract the support of as many smaller countries as possible, and to prevent their rivals from gaining too many supporters. Smaller countries will probably gain more from playing the field than from signing up with one or other of the great powers.

This will be a world of endless maneuver – a world of competitive cooperation where the battle lines and pitfalls are not always obvious.

In short, we're entering a world not of threats but of agonising choices that will come at us constantly. My bet is that we'll look back on the vanished threats that Quiggin talks about with nostalgia for a world that all seemed so simple.

Photo by Flickr user alancleaver_2000.

David Barton, the Christian conman who’s revising history to have a far more Christian slant to it than it deserves — and influencing several state history curriculums in the process — was on The Daily Show last night. The extended interview is now on their website.

The Daily Show
The whole thing is just infuriating. Barton goes on and on (and on), talking over Stewart, saying that Christianity is under attack. Stewart calls him out on it. Barton changes the subject, cherrypicks court cases to prove some obscure point, and acts like he’s victorious. (Both Barton and Stewart also misstate a lawsuit brought about by the Freedom From Religion Foundation — FFRF has no desire to force people to stop praying, but they don’t believe the government should be promoting a National Day of Prayer. And they’re right.) Stewart never really nails him, though, and I was unsatisfied after watching the entire interview.

Chris Rodda wasn’t happy, either. She had written a book debunking the lies of the Christian Right’s retelling of our nation’s founding called Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History Vol. 1.

But after hearing the interview, she can’t take it anymore. She’s going to give away her book for free in the hope that the truth can spread:

Sure, I could write about the particular snippets of disinformation and dishonesty that spewed forth from Barton during this particular interview, but what good would that do? Been there; done that. Then, staring up at the face of Ben Franklin, it was his words, “Do well by doing good,” that suddenly popped into my head…

… [Those words] have now been stuck in my head for hours, and aren’t going to leave until I do what I’m about to do: give my book away for free.

Can I afford to do this? No. Do I need to do this? Yes! Will lots of people download it and read it? I have no freakin’ idea. It’s just what I need to do to be able to look Ben Franklin in the eye on that poster on my wall.

So download it, read it, spread it, and help put a dent into Barton’s influence. Better yet, buy it if you can so future volumes can be published.
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44 Republican U.S. Senators today sent a letter to President Obama stating that they will not confirm any nominee, regardless of party affiliation, to be the Director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) absent structural changes that will make the Bureau accountable to the American people.  Under the Dodd-Frank financial regulation Act, the Director is given unfettered authority to regulate businesses that extend consumer credit.  Although the Director will also have hundreds of millions of dollars of public money at his or her disposal, no checks and balances are provided on how it is spent.  In light of these facts, the Senators sent today’s letter out of concern that such unchecked authority could be used for political purposes at the expense of access to credit, job creation, economic growth, and financial stability.

In the letter, the Senators call for three specific, common sense reforms to the Bureau’s structure:

• Replace the single Director with a board to oversee the Bureau.  This would prevent a single person from dominating the Bureau and provide a critical check on the Bureau’s authority. 
• Subject the Bureau to the Congressional appropriations process.  This would provide oversight and accountability to the American people on how public money is spent. 
• Establish a safety-and-soundness check for the prudential financial regulators, who oversee the safety and soundness of financial institutions.  This would help ensure that excessive regulations do not needlessly cause bank failures.

President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act into law on July 21, 2010.  Although Democrats heralded the Bureau as the centerpiece of their legislation, the President has yet to nominate a Director. 

Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ken.), a lead signatory on the letter made the following statement: “The CFPB as created by the deeply-flawed Dodd-Frank Act is set to be one of the least accountable and most powerful agencies in Washington.  Today’s letter delivers a commitment by 44 Republican Senators to fix the poorly-thought structure of this agency that will have unprecedented reach and control over individual consumer decisions—but an unprecedented lack of oversight and accountability.  The reforms outlined are necessary before we will consider any nominee to head this agency.”

Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), Ranking Republican on the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs and also a lead signatory on the letter, issued the following statement: “This about accountability. The Bureau, as currently structured, lacks any semblance of the checks and balances inherent in the Constitution.  Everyone supports consumer protection, but we should never entrust a single person with this much power and public money.  We are simply asking the President to support common sense reforms that provide the accountability absent in the current structure.”

Senator Jerry Moran, (R-Kan.), who has filed legislation that would enact reforms contained in the letter, made the following remarks: “Allowing a single unelected bureaucrat to define their own jurisdiction and regulate vast segments of our economy without accountability or restraint is a ‘reform’ that should be rejected. My common sense legislation brings a variety of perspectives to the Bureau and gives Congress the oversight authority required for such a powerful agency. We stand ready to work with the president to make certain the CFPB is both effective and accountable.” 

The full text of the letter is provided below.   

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Honorable Barack Obama
The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20500-0005

Dear Mr. President:

We write to express our concerns about the lack of accountability in the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).  As presently organized, far too much power will be vested in the CFPB director without any effective checks and balances.  Accordingly, we will not support the consideration of any nominee, regardless of party affiliation, to be the CFPB director until the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is reformed.

The Dodd-Frank Act grants the CFPB director unprecedented authority over financial institutions and main street businesses.  The CFPB director will have vast rulemaking, supervisory, investigative and enforcement powers and the authority to regulate any person or business that offers or sells a “financial product or service.”  This authority will extend to not just traditional financial institutions, but also potentially thousands of entrepreneurs and small businesses. 

This authority will directly affect every American household by limiting their choices when purchasing financial products, restricting the availability of credit to consumers, and increasing the cost of goods or services purchased using credit.  Furthermore, these regulations could put small banks and businesses at a competitive disadvantage to big banks and businesses, which can more easily absorb compliance costs.  How the CFPB director exercises his or her authority therefore will have a profound influence on the future of our economy and job creation.    

Despite this broad mandate the Dodd-Frank Act failed to provide any real checks on the CFPB director’s powers.  Once confirmed, the director effectively answers to no one.  The CFPB director will be appointed for a five year term and can only be removed by the President in cases of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”  Thus, the director cannot even be removed for poor performance, including enacting ill-conceived regulations.

Moreover, the Dodd-Frank Act grants the director unfettered authority to set the budget of the CFPB.  No agency or institution, including Congress, can review the CFPB budget, and no mechanisms were put in place to ensure that the director is effectively managing public money.

While the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) could vote to stay or set aside a regulation issued by the director, the circumstances under which the council can take such action are so narrow as to make this check illusory.  The council can act only if the regulation puts at risk the safety and soundness of the entire U.S. banking system or the stability of the U.S. financial system.  Moreover, the procedural requirements for the FSOC to act are so high that it will be practically impossible for the FSOC to overrule the CFPB director.

To be clear, we support strong and effective consumer protection.  The present structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, however, violates basic principles of accountability and our democratic values.  No person should have the unfettered authority presently granted to the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  Therefore, we believe that the Senate should not consider any nominee to be CFPB director until the CFPB is properly reformed.  We urge the adoption of the following reforms:

• Establish a board of directors to oversee the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  To prevent a single individual from dominating the actions of the CFPB it should be governed by a board of directors.  Diversifying the leadership of the CFPB would also reduce the potential for the politicization of the CFPB and ensure the consideration of multiple viewpoints in the CFPB’s decision-making.  This structure is consistent with the organization of the Federal Reserve Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

 

• Subject the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to the appropriations process.  To ensure that the CFPB does not engage in wasteful or inappropriate spending and has effective oversight, the CFPB should be subject to the Congressional appropriations process.  The Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission have long been subject to the appropriations process for the same reasons.

 

• Establish a safety-and-soundness check for the prudential regulators.  Federal bank regulators should be given meaningful tools to prevent the CFPB’s regulations from needlessly causing a bank failure.  After all, one of the best consumer protections is a safe and sound bank.  Such a check by the prudential regulators will provide a reasonable restraint on the CFPB’s authority and ensure that the CFPB’s regulations strike the right balance between consumer protection and safety-and-soundness. 

 

We believe these are commonsense reforms that can be promptly adopted by Congress on a bipartisan basis without having to revisit the numerous other flaws with the underlying legislation.  We look forward to working with you to adopt these consensus reforms.

Your overall happiness may depend in part on whether you drew the long or short version of a gene, say researchers

In work that gives cranky teenagers another reason to blame their parents for all life's woes, researchers have uncovered a genetic link to happiness.

The study of more than 2,500 Americans revealed two variants of a gene that influenced how satisfied – or dissatisfied – people were with their lot.

Those born with two long versions of the gene (one is passed down from each parent) were more likely to declare themselves "very satisfied" with life than those who inherited two short versions.

The study marks a tentative step towards explaining the mystery of why some people seem naturally happier than others.

"This gives us more insight into the biological mechanisms that influence life satisfaction," said Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, a researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

"If you're feeling down, you can say it's your biology telling you life is less rosy that it is," he added.

A greater understanding of happiness genes might in future allow would-be parents to create a child who will be more satisfied with their life.

Happiness is only partly influenced by genetic makeup. Studies in twins suggest that genes account for roughly a third to a half of the variation in happiness between people. It is not yet known how many genes affect how cheerful we are.

De Neve looked at the genetic makeup of 2,574 people selected to be representative of the general population, whose medical histories were recorded for the US National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Among the records were answers to a question participants were asked in their early 20s about life satisfaction.

In response to the question, "How satisfied are you with your life as a whole", they answered either "very satisfied", "satisfied", "neither satisfied or dissatisfied", "dissatisfied" or "very dissatisfied".

Writing in the Journal of Human Genetics, De Neve describes how roughly 40% said they were "very satisified" with life, and among these, 35.4% had two long variants of the gene and only 19.1% had two short versions. Of those who were "dissatisfied" with life, 26.2% had two long variants of the gene, while 20% had two short versions. That indicates a slight over-representation of the long variants in happier people.

The gene, known as 5-HTT, is involved with the transport of serotonin, a feelgood chemical, in the brain. The longer variant leads to more efficient release and recycling of the neurotransmitter.

De Neve calculated that, everything else being equal, having one long version of the gene increased the number of people claiming to be "very satisfied" with life by around 8.5%. Having two long versions raised the number by 17.3%.

In unpublished work, De Neve and other researchers have since replicated the result in a separate group of people.

De Neve urged caution over the result, however, and emphasised that inheriting two short versions of the gene did not condemn a person to a life of misery any more than two long versions would make someone impervious to sadness.

"This gene has an important influence, but you cannot say it causes happiness. Happiness is hugely complex and your experiences throughout the course of your life will remain the dominant force on that," he said.

A 2009 study by Elaine Fox at the University of Essex suggested that people who carried long versions of the 5-HTT gene had a greater tendency to focus on the positives in life. The "bright side" version of the gene might bolster people's resilience to stressful events, and protect against anxiety, depression and other mental health problems.

Ed Diener, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author of the 2008 book, Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth, said: "We are just beginning to understand the actual genetics of happiness, and how genes might influence brain hormones and other physiology that influence our well-being.

"This exciting work offers insights that one day may help us counter disorders such as depression. Parents one day might have the choice of whether to choose genes that will create a child who is more satisfied with his or her life."

by David Roberts.

In his Climate Shift report, Matt Nisbet purports to compare the lobbying efforts of climate-bill supporters and opponents. He finds that, in 2009, the former spent $394 million and the latter $259 million. In other words, greens and their allies outspent their opponents. “The narrative [that] this is David versus Goliath does not match the numbers on the ground,” says Nisbet.

As a bunchload of people have pointed out, the way Nisbet gets these numbers is kind of dodgy. The full lobbying budgets of all participants in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership are counted toward the total, which is, a moment’s thought will indicate, crazypants. GE and BP spent all their lobbying money pushing for cap-and-trade? The idea of such single-minded green determination from America’s corporations is amusing—not to say a bit wistful—but back on Planet Earth, GE and BP had plenty else to lobby about. The climate lobbying done by the corporate world, what there was of it, was effectively defensive, insuring that if a bill was going to pass it would protect their interests. It doesn’t even make sense to count the entire lobbying budget of green groups. They had other problems too. As one enviro reminded me, “this was the same year as Copenhagen!”

But let’s put the manhandled numbers aside. Bryan Walsh of Time says critics of the report are being the “negative-image” of climate skeptics, niggling with details in order to reject a larger conclusion they don’t like. And indeed, I don’t like Nisbet’s larger conclusion. I think it’s wrong! So let’s talk about that.

Imagine, if you will, a spectrum: On one end, there are those who see politics as a battle of interests, a raw contest of “power politics” waged with the weapons of money and influence. “Post-truth politics,” one might call it. On the other end, there are those who see politics as a battle of ideas, wherein the cleverest messaging and policy proposals attract the most reasonable people and public support, and win. Obviously there’s a mix of the two, and one can come down anywhere in between on the spectrum.

In Nisbet’s telling, the green movement has devoted itself to power politics when it’s actually involved in a battle of ideas, and it’s losing. It needs new ideas, new policies, new messages, not just more organizing and spending and lobbying. Cap-and-trade was always doomed because it’s the wrong idea at the wrong time. That’s why Nisbet tries to show that supporters of the climate bill were as powerful as opponents. If he can show that the sides were evenly matched in the battle of interests, then the only thing that can explain the loss is bad ideas.

Lots of wonks, pundits, and journos are inclined to agree with this conclusion, which is why there’s this bizarre phenomenon of people saying, “Sure, the numbers that support the point are problematic, but the point stands.” But I don’t think the point does stand.

Over the years, I’ve drifted steadily toward the battle-of-interests side of the spectrum. It brings me no joy. Like my brethren on the left, I love ideas. I love debating and persuading. I would love to think that we could win more political battles by talking better, since talking better is something I’m good at and I have no particular appetite or aptitude for power politics. But wanting it to be about ideas doesn’t make it so. And looking back, it seems to me the worst mistakes made by the left in pursuit of a climate bill—and I’ll happily concede there were many—were precisely failures of power politics.

So it’s important to understand the balance of interests. Specifically, it’s important to understand that Nisbet’s larger point—that advocates for climate policy are as powerful as their foes—is nonsense. And it’s nonsense to think that a comparison of 2009 lobbying budgets would show otherwise, even if it were based on non-crazypants numbers.

The primary barriers faced by advocates of a shift away from fossil fuels are structural. Cheap fossil fuels have shaped America’s infrastructure, industry, politics, land use, consumer habits, and self-image for over a century. They’re woven into the fabric of U.S. history, commerce, and governance. Relationships among fossil-fuel execs, lobbyists, and politicians date back generations. Even if advocates for change can argue convincingly that there will be winners from the shift to a low-carbon economy—more winners than losers, even—the fact remains that many of the future losers currently wield enormous influence and the future winners don’t yet exist, are not yet organized, do not yet have a history of cultural affiliation and financial common interest with politicians.

To make matters worse, the U.S. economy suffers income inequality greater than Egypt’s, Yemen’s, or Tunisia’s and the U.S. political system is weighted heavily toward the interests of the wealthy. The U.S. Senate overrepresents rural interests by design and, particularly given the now-routine abuse of the filibuster, has granted absolute veto power to a tiny sliver of Americans. The Citizens United decision has given corporations free reign to spend without limits or disclosure. Up and down the line, U.S. politics is riddled with veto points where a motivated minority can grind change to a halt.

That is not a level playing field. It is status quo bias run amok, a field tilted sharply tilted against progress. That is the background against which lobbying on a particular bill in a particular year must be assessed. Fossil-fuel forces could have spent any amount of money; there was no limit to what was available and legal. And yet they only had to spend $259 million! Hell, they probably didn’t even need to spend that much—it was just insurance. They were sitting atop a mountain of structural advantages, watching their opponents spend every available penny to struggle their way up the slope.

The U.S. conservative movement, dedicated above all else to defending the status quo interests of the wealthy, has existing networks that can be activated against any major Democratic policy proposal. Any proposal at all. To their base and their corporate donors alike, everything Dems do is one undifferentiated blob of big government spending, burdensome regulation, and incipient tyranny. They don’t have to distinguish cap-and-trade—they don’t want to!—they just have to file it under Tax. They don’t have to distinguish green R&D, they just have to file it under Spending. The messages and coalitions don’t have to be crafted and assembled; they’re right there, ready to go. They move against efforts at progress like a school of fish, as one.

Against this unified front of opposition came a diverse, fractured left. It may be, as Nisbet says, that green philanthropists and NGOs (finally) had a coherent strategy. But that is just one of the left’s constituencies. The climate bill was battered from the left base, which almost overnight became carbon tax and cap-and-dividend obsessives. It was battered from the right and center by the Breakthrough crowd and various others who thought it should have confined itself to narrow, less controversial bits and pieces. From the left intelligentsia and commentariat (and from Obama), it largely received benign neglect or notional, inch-deep support. From mainstream journalists it received a torrent of stale conventional wisdom exaggerating costs and ignoring benefits.

Again: not a level playing field. It may have been the green establishment’s attempt at power politics, but it wasn’t a very good attempt. And it never will be a good attempt until the effort goes beyond environmental groups. After all, if it’s absurd to think of climate change as just another pollution problem, then it’s equally absurd to think that it should be left in the hands of anti-pollution groups. You can bitch about the failure of anti-pollution groups to transfigure themselves into something bigger and different on the fly, or you can acknowledge that the problem is pervasive—economic, industrial, cultural—and so the effort to address it must be just as pervasive. No special-interest lobby, no matter how clever its messaging, no matter how next-paradigm-y its policy proposals, can possibly hope to overcome a century’s worth of inertia and the power of one of the world’s most profitable industries.

It’s a battle of interests that’s being lost. It may be that greens need new policies and messages—probably so!—but to locate that as the primary need, the key to the lock, is just to will away the forest because a single tree is easier to grasp. (Or, alternatively, a single hippie is easier to punch.) Ideas are wonderful. And I’m all for new ones, the shinier and more clever the better. But ideas alone aren’t going to win this fight.

Related Links:

How to profit from the coming ecopocalypse

New York Times blows the Dust Bowl story

Tornadoes, extreme weather, and climate change

I’ve heard a number of stories recently about people feeling “pressured” or “bullied” by their industry colleagues, network, and sometimes even customers, to give black hat SEO tactics a try. This context is analogous to the familiar “just say no” scenario, and requires the same strong resolve to do the right thing, and not give in. If you find yourself being coerced with the following propositions, we’ve armed you with best practice information to remain above the influence.   

 1. Everybody Is Doing It:  You may hear that black hat tactics are common practice, that everyone engages in these tactics in one way or another, and that you are missing out in a big way if you decide to avoid tactics such as link exchanges or purchased links. The truth is, the best links are those that are produced organically, period.  Even if you hear that people are doing this, there is no way around creating great content and engaging your community via social media to drive healthy, clean links to your site the right way.

2. It’s Really Easy to Hide It, You’ll Never Get Caught: Maybe you’re hiding links by blending with them in with the page background, or you removed the default formatting of links (i.e. color and underline) to make the link look like body text. Sneaky, sneaky, but you can’t fool the search engines.  You can be sure that Google and others are ALWAYS on the lookout for all black, and even grey-hat practices, and will eventually penalize you, no matter how sly your tactics are.

 3. Doing It Once Is Ok: Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but at some point, regardless of how many black hat tactics you have applied, your website will be penalized. Using these strategies, while possibly effective at first, leave you open to detrimental repercussions ranging from losing money invested, to dropping in ranking, or being completely banned by Google. All of your hard work can be thrown out with window, with one bad decision.

Marketing Takeaway 

Just say no to black hat tactics. The marginal benefit you may gain from these approaches today is NOT worth being penalized in the future (meaning no traffic, which equals no leads or new business).  As you hear about different “link building strategies” that “everybody is doing,” a good rule of thumb to follow is, if you have to ask, it’s not white hat. Focus on creating compelling content that people want to link to, to maintain the integrity of your website.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vlauria/

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Scientists warn that farming practices must be adapted to a warmer world and rises in global population

Global warming has already harmed the world's food production and has driven up food prices by as much as 20% over recent decades, new research has revealed.

The drop in the productivity of crop plants around the world was not caused by changes in rainfall but was because higher temperatures can cause dehydration, prevent pollination and lead to slowed photosynthesis.

Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, Washington DC, said the findings indicate a turning point: "Agriculture as it exists today evolved over 11,000 years of reasonably stable climate, but that climate system is no more." Adaptation is difficult because our knowledge of the future is not strong enough to drive new investments, he said, "so we just keep going, hoping for the best."

The scientists say their work shows how crucial it is to find ways to adapt farming to a warmer world, to ensure that rises in global population are matched by rising food production. "It is vital," said Wolfram Schlenker, at Columbia University in New York and one of the research team. "If we continue to have the same seed varieties and temperatures continue to rise, then food prices will rise further. [Addressing] that is the big question."

The new research joins a small number of studies in which the fingerprint of climate change has been separated from natural variations in weather and other factors, demonstrating that the effects of warming have already been felt in the world. Scientists have shown that the chance of the severe heatwave that killed thousands in Europe in 2003 was made twice as likely by global warming, while other work showed that the floods that caused £3.5bn of damage in England in 2000 were made two to three times more likely.

Food prices have reached new record highs this year, and have been implicated as a trigger for unrest in the Middle East and Africa. A rising appetite for meat is a critical factor, said Wolfram. "We actually have enough calories to feed the world quite comfortably, the problem is meat is really inefficient," as many kilogrammes of grain are needed to produce one kilogramme of meat, he said. "As countries get richer and have a preference for meat, which is more expensive, they price people in poorer countries out of the market."

"The research provides evidence of big shifts in wheat and maize production," commented Prof Tim Wheeler at the Walker Institute for Climate System Research, Reading University, UK, who added it had involved "heroic" statistical analysis. But he said that, while long-term climate change impacts were another pressure on food prices, short-term price spikes were linked to extreme weather events, such as the Russian heatwaves and wildfires in 2010.

The study, published in the journal Science, examined how rising temperatures affected the annual crop yields of all major producer nations between 1980 and 2008. Computer models were used to show how much grain would have been harvested in the absence of warming. Overall, yields have been rising over the last decades and the models took this into account. The scientists found that global wheat production was 33m tonnes (5.5%) lower than it would have been without warming and maize production was 23m tonnes (3.8%) lower. Specific countries fared worse than the average, with Russia losing 15% of its potential wheat crop, and Brazil, Mexico and Italy suffering above average losses. Some countries experienced lower production of rice and soybeans, although these drops were offset by gains in other countries.

The losses drove up food prices by as much as 18.9%, the team calculated, although the rise could be as low as 6.4% if the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere strongly boosts plant growth and yields - a factor that is not well understood by scientists.

Global food prices have risen by about 200% in recent years, says Schlenker. Other causes of the rise are the increased demand for meat and the diversion of food into biofuels. Nonetheless, the researchers conclude that the negative impact on crops overall is "likely to be incurring large economic and health costs".

The US, which has the world's largest share of overall production, stood out in the analysis because it appears to have lost no production to climate change as yet. Schlenker said this was because the rise in temperature there was very small compared to other parts of the world. This was perhaps due simply to luck with the weather, or the cooling influence of aerosol particles, such as soot, that blocks warming.

"US farmers are having a good time in the sense that their yields have not been impacted much and prices have been pretty high, so for them it has been pretty profitable," he said. "But most climate models predict that eventually the US will warm."

Adapting farming to climate change could involved moving to cooler areas as existing areas warm, said Schlenker, but often soils are poorer in the new locations. He highlighted the potential of biotechnology - genetic engineering - to develop new crop varieties that are more resistant to heat, but said the potential remains unproven. "What happens over the next 20 years depends on how optimistic you are about finding those extra ways of adapting."

I have started batting out short positions as fast as the market can field them. To be more specific, I am buying puts and selling calls on the S&P 500 (SPX), loading the boat with the double short ETF (SDS), and unloading other asset classes as well.

I get asked more questions about market timing than anything else. Why here? Why now? Let me give you a list of reasons I picked this particular week to hit the sell button. You will find a minestrone soup of fundamental and technical reasons. I try to use every tool in the bag when making a call like this.

*The collapse of silver. The white metal has morphed into a great leading indicator of global risk taking as a whole. The $7 plunge in London on Sunday night was all I needed to sell.

*Good news was having a declining positive influence on prices.

*The calendar. Tech earnings lead every earnings season, starting it off with a bang, and the global consumers get to speak first in this process. The excitement trails off after that.

*The calendar. The first day of the month was always up big, as monthly allocations hit the market. When it wasn’t on May 2, the red light started flashing.

*The calendar. Sell in May and go away. It is not more complicated than that.

*PE multiples, at 15, are in the middle of their historic range of 10-20, but at the top of what I believe is their future range of 10-16, with US GDP growth at 2.0%.

*All “RISK ON” asset classes, from the euro (FXE), to gold (GLD), silver (SLV), oil (DIG), and bonds (TLT) have been moving in complete lockstep to the upside. This has only happened a handful of times in the last century and always ends in tears. When everything rolled over in unison this week they were begging me to sell.

*Correlation among asset classes is now at an all-time high.

*Investor sentiment was reaching extremes, with 54.9% bullish and only 16.5% bearish, saying that the market could only go down from here, as all the buyers are already in.

*Every big hedge fund manager I know has been scaling back positions since February, many cutting back positions to a few million dollars on the desks to keep the kids from getting bored.

*The Q1 GDP was a shocker, from 3.1% to 1.8%

*Weekly jobless claims have suddenly started to worsen.

*The put/call ratio has gone through the roof, hitting 2.0, as portfolio managers start piling on downside protection.

*The reallocation out of risky sectors, like technology and energy, and into safe ones, like health care and consumer staples, could not have been more clear.

*Listen to Dr. Copper. He was shouting at us that the markets peaked in February.

*A number of technical programs I follow started spitting out sell signals on Monday. At a minimum, we will hit the 50 day moving average for the (SPX) 40 points lower at 1,320.

When stocks and bonds give conflicting signals, it is usually the bond market that is right. Recently stocks have been going up, meaning the economy is great, while rising bonds have been signaling a weak economy. The global bond market is ten times larger than the US stock market, meaning they have far greater resources to pour into research and analytics. Sell stocks.

By. Mad Hedge Fund Trader

John Thomas, The Mad Hedge Fund Trader is one of today's most successful Hedge Fund Managers and a 40 year veteran of the financial markets. He has one of the best performing newsletters and has just launched a new investment service for Investors and Traders. Click here for more information. 

The Pew Research Center has released one of its periodic typology studies (the last was in 2005), and you can expect it to have considerable influence on the language of political analysis in the immediate future. Here's how the report authors sum up what's happened to the "clustering" of Americans into relatively coherent groups in the last five or six years:

With the economy still struggling and the nation involved in multiple military operations overseas, the public's political mood is fractious. In this environment, many political attitudes have become more doctrinaire at both ends of the ideological spectrum, a polarization that reflects the current atmosphere in Washington.

Yet at the same time, a growing number of Americans are choosing not to identify with either political party, and the center of the political spectrum is increasingly diverse. Rather than being moderate, many of these independents hold extremely strong ideological positions on issues such as the role of government, immigration, the environment and social issues. But they combine these views in ways that defy liberal or conservative orthodoxy.

For political leaders in both parties, the challenge is not only one of appeasing ideological and moderate "wings" within their coalitions, but rather holding together remarkably disparate groups, many of whom have strong disagreements with core principles that have defined each party's political character in recent years.

More specifically, the new typology presents two Republican clusters (Staunch Conservatives and Main Street Republicans); three groups of Democrats (Solid Liberals, New Coalition Democrats, and Hard-Pressed Democrats); and three groups of independents (Libertarians, Disaffecteds, and Post-Moderns).

In general, Pew's analysis reinforces the generally-accepted belief that Republicans enjoy more ideological coherence than Democrats, but there are some pretty striking contradictions between the views of the Staunch Conservatives who dominate GOP politics these days and at least one of the GOP-leaning indie groups, the Disaffecteds, who support more government help for the needy and strongly dislike corporations. The three Democratic "types" and the Democratic-leaning indie group the Post-Moderns have significant differences of opinion on the importance of the environment and attitudes towards immigrants.

You can wander around in the data presented in this report for days. But the important thing to remember with any political typology is that particular groups should not become obsessive objects of attention. For Democrats, "capturing" indie groups from the GOP, for example, doesn't matter a bit more than boosting rates among Democratic groups or shaving votes from the Republican margins among GOP groups. Indeed, the Pew report shows that one of the biggest pro-Republican swings between 2008 and 2010 was among Main Street Republicans, whose modest but significant support levels for Obama in 2008 all but vanished two years later.

A vote's a vote, in other words, but it is very helpful to know how combinations of issues and demographic factors combine to shape the electorate.

(Steven Hayward)

Scott along with many observers (me included) have raised their eyebrows about Bin Laden's burial at sea with full Islamic observances. If it had been left to me. . . well, let's just say I probably incline to what I imagine are Scott's inclinations.

However, the matter did send me back, as it has many times since 9/11, to Churchill's account of the British campaign to retake the Sudan in 1898 and avenge the death of General Charles Gordon at the hands of Islamic fanatics more than a decade before, thrillingly told in The River War. (A new, annotated edition of the original two-volume version of The River War is forthcoming soon, produced by University of Alaska professor James Muller. Jim was kind enough to send me galleys a while ago.)

A little bit of the "backstory" is required to appreciate some of the rough parallels between 1898 and 2001. The British had dispatched General Gordon to Khartoum in 1885 to evacuate the British garrison that was growing increasingly isolated and menaced by the rising tide of jihad led by Mohammad Ahmed, who declared himself to be the second great prophet of Islam--the Mahdi. Gordon's forces were too little and too late; he was surrounded and wiped out by the Mahdi's forces. Although the Mahdi and his armies should not be regarded as the exact equivalent of today's terrorists, they were nonetheless barbaric in the extreme. They mutilated Gordon's body, and cut off his head to be paraded around the Mahdi's villages.

The British did nothing to avenge the death of Gordon or retrieve their position in the Sudan for several years. But throughout the early years of the 1890s, public opinion in favor of a war against the Madhdist forces in the Sudan steadily grew, until, following the replacement of a Liberal Party government with a Conservative Party government in 1895, it was decided to embark upon the reconquest of the Sudan. I wrote about the parallels between then and today in The Weekly Standard a few weeks after 9/11:

There was no single reason why this decision was made. As Churchill explained it: "The diplomatist said: 'It is to please the Triple Alliance.' The politician said: 'It is to triumph over the radicals.' The polite person said: 'It is to restore the Khedive's rule [the Khedive was the native ruler of Egypt] in the Sudan.' But the man in the street--and there are many men in many streets--said: 'It is to avenge General Gordon.'" (Emphasis added.) Much the same can be said about the aroused state of public opinion in America since September 11: by all means a deliberate and patient military and diplomatic campaign must be made by President Bush, but at the end of the day there is one requirement by the man on the street in America: The World Trade Center must be avenged.

Our moment of vengeance has at length arrived. But there is still another parallel from The River War to be drawn: what to do about the remains of the Mahdi, who had died and been enshrined in a large tomb in Khartoum. General Kitchener ordered the tomb destroyed and the Mahdi's remains disinterred. Similar to the Obama administration, Kitchener wanted the Mahdi's tomb destroyed and his remained scattered so that it wouldn't become a rallying point of jihadists. But Kitchener also wanted to give the Mahdi's skull to the Queen to use as an inkwell--a plan that Lord Cromer, the British administrator in Cairo, countermanded when he found out about it.

Although the Mahdi's similarities to Bin Laden are far from exact, from Churchill's evaluation of the matter it would seem that he would have lined up on the side of the Obama administration in giving Bin Laden a proper burial:

By Sir H. Kitchener's orders the Tomb has been profaned and razed to the ground. The corpse of the Mahdi was dug up. The head was separated from the body, and, to quote the official explanation, 'preserved for future disposal'-- a phrase which must in this case be understood to mean, that it was passed from hand to hand till it reached Cairo. Here it remained, an interesting trophy, until the affair came to the ears of Lord Cromer, who ordered it to be immediately reinterred at Wady Halfa. The limbs and trunk were flung into the Nile. Such was the chivalry of the conquerors! . . .

It may be worth while to examine the arguments of those who seek to justify the demolition of the Tomb. Their very enumeration betrays a confusion of thought which suggests insincerity. Some say that the people of the Soudan no longer believed in the Mahdi and cared nothing for the destruction of a fallen idol, and that therefore the matter was of little consequence. Others contend on the same side of the argument that so great was the Mahdi's influence, and so powerful was his memory, that though his successor had been overthrown his tomb would have become a place of pilgrimage, and that the conquering Power did not dare allow such an element of fanaticism to disturb their rule. The contradiction is apparent. But either argument is absurd without the contradiction. If the people of the Soudan cared no more for the Mahdi, then it was an act of Vandalism and folly to destroy the only fine building which might attract the traveller and interest the historian. It is a gloomy augury for the future of the Soudan that the first action of its civilised conquerors and present ruler should have been to level the one pinnacle which rose above the mud houses. If, on the other hand, the people of the Soudan still venerated the memory of the Mahdi--and more than 50,000 had fought hard only a week before to assert their respect and belief--then I shall not hesitate to declare that to destroy what was sacred and holy to them was a wicked act, of which the true Christian, no less than the philosopher, must express his abhorrence.

No man who holds by the splendid traditions of the old Liberal party, no man who is in sympathy with the aspirations of Progressive Toryism, can consistently consent to such behaviour. It will also be condemned by quite a different school of thought, by the wise public servants who administer the Indian Empire. It is an actual offence against the Indian Penal Code to insult the religion of any person; nor is it a valid plea that the culprit thought the said religion 'false.' When Sir Bindon Blood had forced the Tanga Pass and invaded Buner, one of his first acts was to permit his Mohammedan soldiers to visit the Tomb of the Akhund of Swat, who had stirred the tribes into revolt and caused the Umbeyla campaign of 1863. It is because respect is always shown to all shades of religious feeling in India by the dominant race, that our rule is accepted by the mass of the people. If the Soudan is to be administered on principles the reverse of those which have been successful in India, and if such conduct is to be characteristic of its Government, then it would be better if Gordon had never given his life nor Kitchener won his victories.

Different observers will come to varying conclusions about how firm are the parallels and differences in the character of Islamic jihad between what the British faced in 1898 and what the United States faces today. I offer this passage as food for thought.

Nota bene: This passage is one of the many Churchill suppressed--because he came to realize his many criticisms of Kitchener were politically imprudent--from all the subsequent editions of The River War that most people have seen. You'll have to get Muller's splendid new edition (not yet listed on Amazon, alas) to see this and many other hugely interesting passages from what I regard as one of Churchill's two or three greatest books.

Originally posted in The Technium

Where you live probably has more influence on your life than almost any other decision you will make, says Richard Florida, the guy who studies (and coined the term) the "creative class." Yet it is one decision we'd don't make very thoughtfully. This book, Who's Your City?, will make you reconsider where you are. And it will force you to reconsider the value of cities, and revision conventional wisdom on globalization. It's a monograph 21-century urbanity disguised as a self-help book. The advice -- to choose your location deliberately -- applys to everyone. The insight -- the economic engines of the world are not nations but mega-city clusters -- has changed my idea of the future.

Sample highlights

It's a mantra of the age of globalization that where we live doesn't matter. We can work as efficiently from a ski chalet in Aspen or a country house in Provence as from an office in Silicon Valley. It doesn't make a difference as long as we have wireless and a cell phone.

It's a compelling notion, but it's wrong. Today's key economic factors—talent, innovation, and creativity—are not distributed evenly across the global economy. They concentrate in specific locations. It's obvious how major new innovations in communications and transportation allow economic activity to spread out all over the world. What's less obvious is the incredible power of what I call the clustering force. In today's creative economy, the real source of economic growth comes from the clustering and concentration of talented and productive people. New ideas are generated and our productivity increases when we locate close to one another in cities and regions. The clustering force makes each of us more productive, which in turns makes the places we inhabit much more productive, generating great increases in output and wealth.

Despite all the hype over globalization and the "flat world," place is actually more important to the global economy than ever before. Places are growing more diverse and specialized—from their economic makeup and job market to the quality of life they provide and the kinds of people that live in them. We live in a highly mobile society, giving most of us more say over where we live.

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The place we choose to live affects every aspect of our being. It can determine the income we earn, the people we meet, the friends we make, the partners we choose, and the options available to our children and families. People are not equally happy everywhere, and some places do a better job of providing a high quality of life than others. Some places offer us more vibrant labor markets, better career prospects, higher real estate appreciation, and stronger investment and earnings opportunities. Some places offer more promising mating markets. Others are better environments for raising children.

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The stakes are high, and yet, when faced with the decision of where to call home, most of us are not prepared to make the right choice. If you ask most people how they got to the place they live now, they'll say they just ended up there. They stayed close to family or friends, they got a job there, or more commonly, they followed an old flame. Some don't even see that there's a choice to be made at all.

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Creative people cluster not simply because they like to be around each other, or because they all happen to prefer cosmopolitan centers with lots of amenities, though both of those things tend to be true. Creative people and companies cluster because of the powerful productivity advantages, economies of scale, and knowledge spillovers such density brings.

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For some, the world today looks flat because the economic and social distances between the peaks have gotten smaller. People in spiky places are often more connected to each other, even from half a world away, than they are to people and places in their own backyards. This peak-to-peak connectivity is accelerated by the highly mobile creative class, of about 150 million people worldwide. They participate in a global technology system and a global labor market, both of which allow them to migrate more freely among the world's leading cities. While the world itself is far from flat, the dense network of interconnections among its peaks can make it appear that way to a privileged minority.

The reality is that globalization has two sides. The first and more obvious one is the geographic spread of routine economic functions such as simple manufacturing or service work (for example, making or answering telephone calls). The second, less obvious side to globalization is the tendency for higher-level economic activities such as innovation, design, finance, and media to cluster in a relatively small number of locations.

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Gulden likes to say a mega-region is somewhere you can walk all the way across, from one side to the other, carrying nothing but some money without ever getting thirsty or hungry

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"What can people be paying Manhattan or downtown Chicago rents for, if not to be around other people?"

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When people—especially talented and creative ones—come together, ideas flow more freely, and as a result individual and aggregate talents increase exponentially: the end result amounts to much more than the sum of the parts. This clustering makes each of us more productive, which in turn makes the place we inhabit even more so—and our collective creativity and economic wealth grow accordingly. This in a nutshell is the clustering force.

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Unlike biological organisms, all of which slow down as they grow larger, cities become wealthier and more creative the bigger they get. They called this phenomenon "superlinear" scaling: "By almost any measure, the larger a city's population, the greater the innovation and wealth per person."

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Our model also forecasts a world increasingly dominated by massive mega-regions. By 2025, our world will be considerably more concentrated around mega-regions than it is today. By then, something as sci-fi sounding as a mega-region with several hundred million people may exist. It may sound far-fetched, but given historical precedents and current rates, such a world may well be far from fantasy. Think of it this way: just two hundred years ago, the largest cities held fewer than 100,000 people; back then, a city of 1 million people was unimaginable.

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When social scientists talk about mobility, they are typically referring to socioeconomic mobility — the ease with which people move up or down the ladder of social and economic status. But my research and personal experience have convinced me that socioeconomic mobility and geographic mobility are interdependent and far from mutually exclusive.

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Survey data estimates the monetary value of frequently seeing friends and relatives. The study found that seeing friends or relatives in person almost every day is worth more than six figures in additional income. For example, Powdthavee found that if you relocate from a city where you regularly see your family and friends to one where you would not, you would need to earn $133,000 just to make up for the lack of happiness you feel from being far from those people.

The old ways and the old days will not return.  We live in a new global community fueled by a technology-driven economy and marketplace.  The good news is that today, contrary to what you have been told by the negative and pessimistic voices competing for your attention, or what you think, there are UNLIMITED OPPORTUNITIES.

Unlimited opportunities

If you are a job seeker, there are unlimited opportunities that await you when you RETHINK and transform yourself from a job seeker to an opportunity seeker.  If you are a business owner or entrepreneur, there are unlimited markets, customers, and sources for increased revenue and profits if you RETHINK how you manage your enterprise.  If you are a manager or employee of a company, there are unlimited opportunities to provide greater value that will result in higher wages and an enhanced quality of life.  This is not a delusional inference on my part; it is a fact!  For the first time in history, there are no limits to the opportunities you can benefit from except the limits you place on yourself… and how you think.

Reach out and touch 7 billion people – for free!

The workplace has experienced a monumental shift unlike anything ever witnessed.  When the Cold War ended in the early 1990’s, more than 1.8 billion people were freed from the shackles of communism and invited to participate in the free market system.  These newbies to the capitalist way of life are today, where America was well over a hundred years ago.  Outsourcing is a natural byproduct of having won the Cold War.  Outsourcing is not going to wane over time; in fact it will increase significantly.  Think (or RETHINK), of all that is happening in the Middle East, and in other parts of the world where dictators and autocratic rulers have sabotaged the capitalist process.  We can accurately predict that technology, including Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet, will provide channels of communication that will rapidly liberate people whose lives have been subjugated for decades or longer.  It is inevitable.  This means the United States of America will have achieved its long-term goal of promoting democracy, freedom, and the capitalist market philosophy worldwide.  We are becoming the United State of the World.

The primary benefit for Americans is that everyone has unlimited opportunities to reach out and touch 7 billion people around the globe for new jobs, new opportunities, new customers, new markets, and new friendships.  What is most extraordinary is that we can tap into these unlimited opportunities for free!  Skype is free.  Facebook and MySpace are free.  LinkedIn is free.  When you RETHINK the reality of today’s global, technology-driven marketplace, and see that anything is possible for you, you will grow rich… in every aspect of your life.

4 Tips to get you started:

1. Deliver MORE in value than you receive in compensation. The best investment you can make in your future is to always give more than you receive.  Give more to your customers, to your employer, to the marketplace, and to society.  When you give more in value, you are planting seeds for your own wealth and a richer, more rewarding life.
2. Invest 1 hour a day of “thinking time.” Turn off everything and enjoy an hour with yourself.  This is where new ideas, new thoughts, and new miracles are created.  Most people are not human beings; they are human doings.  Remember, if you don’t go within, you’ll have to go without.
3. Never underestimate the power of influence. Your environment determines achievement.  Evaluate the people you spend time with.  Evaluate where you spend your time and what you watch, read, and listen to.  Influence of others and what you focus on determine if you are RETHINKING and growing richer in life or… heading in the opposite direction.
4. Learn to overcome setbacks, adversity, and obstacles. All success leads through the Forest of Challenges. Don’t wish things were easier.  Rather, master more skills, slay negative emotions, and conquer your fears.  You didn’t stand up the first time you tried to walk, so know that failure is a key ingredient to build success muscles and wealth.

You are invited to my May 20th Seminar at the Palm Beach County Convention Center, West Palm Beach, FL

How to RETHINK and Grow Rich:  The New Laws of Success for the New Workplace

Link to personal 3 minute invitation:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSDW93Lu4Is

Author:

Jay Block is an industry pioneer and the nation’s leading motivational career coach.  Jay is a best-selling author of 15 books, including his latest blockbuster: 101 Best Ways To Land a Job in Troubled Times (McGraw-Hill).  He has a 20-year record of success for creating and recreating the career management industry. His website is: www.jayblock.com

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I was reading Philip Roth’s novel Exit Ghost the other day and was struck a passage on page 60.

Roth is America’s pre-eminent novelist and his reputation rests largely on a series of books in which the American century, from approximately World War II to the present day, provides the background to his characters’ lives. So we follow, in book after book, the lives of people living with everything from the Korean War to 9/11.

The relevant passage is this:

After having parked diagonally alongside the town green, I ran into several of the local merchants I know who came out of their shops to momentarily bask in the sunshine. I stood and talked for a while - about very little, all of us assuming the amiable attitude of men who think only the best of everything, a haberdasher, a liquor store owner, and a writer all exuding the contentment of Americans living safely beyond the reach of the nerve-racking world.

What struck me is that I think it would be impossible for an Australian author to write a passage like that. By which I mean, I don’t think there has ever been a time in our history when Australians have felt protected from the world in the way that Roth’s characters feel in that scene.

Australian self-image has always been built on a sense of misplacement, of being isolated but vulnerable, and one where the world out there is often conceived as a threat. Australia, we feel, is never ‘beyond the reach of the nerve-racking world’.

This sense of looking over our shoulders is not some vague literary allusion but a very real force that has informed how we react to the world. In other words, it informs how we do politics. It is sometimes interpreted as xenophobia, and sometimes it is. But those who seek to understand it as only - or even largely - a matter of race, belittle their fellow citizens.

They also overlook the extent to which we engage with the world, as either individuals, as a nation, or as an economic entity. That undeniable reality belies the image sometimes cited of a scared nation of misplaced Europeans on the edge of Asia.

Whether we have emerged as an outward-looking global nation despite or because of our fears is unsettled, yet it is certainly true that those fears, whatever their nature or cause, have not stopped us from becoming one of the more open and tolerant nations on a troubled planet.

Even the most recent events of global terror and financial collapse have not sparked any wholesale desire to retreat from the world. If anything, they have reinforced in us the sense that we are doing something right. There was nothing lucky about us surviving intact the financial and social meltdown of the past years and we should recognise that.

Of course, there are still occasional hankerings for fortress Australia, and calls for someone to keep us safe. We saw it on The Drum on Monday when Bob Ellis wrote:

It’s called Protectionism, and it means what it says. Like contraceptive sheathes that protect us from AIDS and armies that protect us from invasion and injections that protect us from Asian Flu it protects us from poverty. Protectionism protects us. It delivers us from evil.

There it is writ large, the old terror Australis, the palpable fear of some unshaped everything and the demand that someone keep us safe from it. It’s a call as understandable as it is ridiculous.

Ellis is right to highlight the problems that arise from the openness we have chosen, but his legitimate concerns about the inequities of the global finance sector and such like are soon subsumed under a pathological list of bogeymen. Ellis’s longing for the verities of the 50s ends up being less the wisdom of age than a corrupted nostalgia.

The problem is not openness as such but how we deal with it, and by and large, we have dealt with it pretty well.

Robert Manne offers a more subtle diagnosis of the matter noting that the period from the early 70s when we opened ourselves up to the world was accompanied by ‘optimism and creativity’ and who would deny it?

But Manne succumbs to fear too and comes dangerously close to living up to the caricature of himself presented by the very enemies he cites, that of an out-of-touch elitist who blames the citizens themselves for being self-satisfied and smug:

Because of the influence of a crass new cohort of right-wing commentators - Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones, Miranda Devine, Janet Albrechtsen - the cultural struggle against old patterns of racism was reinterpreted as the arrogant attempt of self-appointed thought police to impose their elitist values on the commonsense virtues of ordinary people.

The greatest enemy of Australian self-criticism and reinvention was the man elected PM in 1996. John Howard was disdainful of what he called the perpetual symposium on national identity. During his prime ministership, self-criticism gradually became confused with un-Australian self-hatred.

Howard sought to reduce the shame of the Indigenous dispossession to a blemish on the otherwise glorious pages of Australian history. Under his influence, Australians were encouraged to take pride in the success of the post-war migration program but to resist the divisive ideology of multiculturalism. Under his influence, the national imagination was militarised, with Gallipoli increasingly unchallengeable as Australia's sacred soil.

Yet the political and cultural complacency that gradually overtook the nation was more insidious than this. Having demonstrated their political and moral superiority in their defeat of the totalitarian Soviet state, the United States and some of its closest anglophone allies, including Australia, managed to convince themselves that they could do no serious political and moral wrong.

Again, there is some truth in his analysis, but that list of comic book bogeymen - Albrechtsen, Jones, Devine, Bolt - is a laughable set of baddies to get hung up about. Each speaks to a small demographic of, to be honest, people like Ellis, older Australians longing for an allegedly simpler time, and they don’t have much clout beyond that cohort.

John Howard is a more legitimate target of Manne’s concerns, but Manne doesn’t mention the salient fact: not only was the Howard government comprehensively defeated at the 2007 election, Howard himself suffered the ignominy of being only the second PM in history to lose his own seat. That’s a pretty good repudiation of his alleged ongoing influence, I would have thought.

Manne’s fear of smugness and self-satisfaction is overstated too. Yes, such values exist, but there is an equal case to be made that our problem is a failure to recognise our success. Manne could’ve just as legitimately argued that what endures - more so than Howard’s militarism - is the sense of fairness that pervades the various social and economic reforms that have opened us up to the world.

In the end, the Howard government’s lip-service to open markets and protected borders was subsumed by the Australian values of fairness and egalitarianism. Thus our financial sector was not deregulated as it was in other countries, and even as he raged against asylum seekers and multiculturalism, our immigration intake skyrocketed.

Howard was more changed by Australia than Australia was changed by Howard.

That we underplay our achievements is almost a given, as if we worry that if we speak about them too openly they might just disappear. I think this is why discussion of issues like multiculturalism and asylum seekers become so heated and so silly, because we are concerned it is all too fragile to survive inspection, let alone explanation. Let alone celebration.

There is a tendency by people like Manne to presume that when misgivings are expressed about multiculturalism or asylum seekers or economic openness that this is somehow a reassertion of something fundamental - elemental - about the Australian character rather than simply the confrontation with irrelevance of an aging demographic given a prominence they don’t deserve by certain sections of the media.

After all, Pauline Hanson turned out to be less a standard bearer for the past into the future than the bad air leaking from a balloon that will no longer fly.

Ellis’s call for protectionism is part of the same release of gas.

What Roth was doing with that passage quoted at the beginning was, I think, to highlight a certain American experience that was altered by the 9/11 attacks. Roth is suggesting that for some, that sense of being ‘beyond the reach of the nerve-racking world’ was taken away.

Maybe it was, but it was always a phony sense of security anyway, a sense of entitlement built on a willed denial of America’s role in the world. Americans could do worse than learn from Australia’s example of how to engage with the nerve-racking world.

Australian history shows that we are not the sum of our fears, though we sometimes give into them. Ellis should join the 21st century and Manne should realise that the intellectual’s role is not always to highlight the negative.

Sometimes it helps to reflect on what we get right.

Tim Dunlop writes fortnightly for The Drum. You can follow him on Twitter and at his blog, B-Sides.

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If we want a law of privacy, what should happen next? There are four possibilities

There are at least four possible "ways forward" for the new law of privacy which has been developed by the courts over the past decade and which has, at least from the point of view of sections of the media, been very controversial. These four possibilities are as follows:

(1) Active steps could be taken to abolish the law of privacy and return to the pre-Human Rights Act position.

(2) The current "judge made" law of privacy could be replaced by a new "statutory tort" of invasion of privacy.

(3) A special "privacy regime" for the media could be established under a statutory regulator.

(4) "Steady as she goes" – the law of privacy could be left to develop in the current way – by the judges on the basis of the Article 8 and Article 10 case law.

Each of these possibilities gives rise to different issues and potential difficulties.

Abolition of the Law of Privacy

The law of privacy has been developed by the judges as part of the common law and the common law can be replaced by statute. A simple one clause Abolition of Privacy Bill: "The tort of misuse of private information is hereby abolished" might be thought to be sufficient.

Unfortunately, things are a bit more complicated than that. The new law of privacy has been developed as a result of duty placed on the courts to act compatibly with convention rights imposed by section 6 of the Human Rights Act. So it would be necessary to amend that section as well – perhaps by the introduction of Lord Wakeham's almost forgotten proposal (which involved excluding the application of section 6 in disputes between two private parties).

However, these steps would, in turn, risk placing the United Kingdom in breach of its positive obligations under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights to protect privacy against media intrusion. It would, in turn, lead to adverse findings in Strasbourg and place the United Kingdom under an obligation in international law to re-introduce a law of privacy. In order to escape from this obligation it would be necessary to denounce the Convention and withdraw from the Council of Europe. As adherence to the Convention is a condition of EU membership it would also be necessary to leave the EU. These extreme steps may be popular with certain sections of the media but are unlikely to be practical politics in the foreseeable future and I will not consider them further. Outright abrogation of the law of privacy is not practical.

It is also difficult to see how a new "British Bill of Rights" would assist those who wish to abrogate the law of privacy. There are two points. First, simple repeal of the Human Rights Act would not, of itself, undo the developments in the common law which it inspired. It has been repeatedly emphasised that the basic values of the European Convention are the same of those of the common law. The common law has developed a law of privacy without a Human Rights Act in New Zealand, some Australian states and parts of Canada. It is unlikely to turn back in England without statutory intervention. Second, if the United Kingdom is to act consistently with its obligations under the European Convention Rights any British Bill of Rights could remove rights from the Convention: in the jargon, it cannot be "Convention minus" it must either replicate the Convention or be "Convention plus".

Critics of the new law of privacy sometimes talk of a "recalibration" of the Human Rights Act in favour of the media. This would involve an attempt to give Article 10 priority over Article 8 in media cases. It would, however, be inconsistent with the approach of the Strasbourg court. A statutory amendment which gave actual priority to freedom of expression in certain situations would be incompatible with Convention rights and would be likely to constitute a violation of Article 8 when applied in specific cases. Once again, the only way in which such a "recalibration" could effectively be carried out is if the United Kingdom were to renounce the Convention.

A Statutory Tort

The second possibility is the introduction of a statutory tort – a course favoured by a number of official inquiries bodies in the 1990s and the early 2000s (see the second post in this series) – presents no such practical difficulties. This approach has been taken in a number of different common law jurisdictions. Statutory torts of privacy have been introduced in four provinces of Canada. The Australian Law Commission has recommended the introduction of a statutory cause of action for a serious invasion of privacy containing a non-exhaustive list of the types of invasion which fall within the cause of action. It was suggested that in order to establish liability a claim would have to show:

(a) A reasonable expectation of privacy; and

(b) The act or conduct complained of is highly offensive to a reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities (See Australian Law Reform Commission, "For Your Information: Australian Privacy Law and Practice", Report 108, May 2008, Recommendations 74-1 and 74-2, p.2584).

The Hong Kong Law Reform Commission proposed the introduction of a tort of invasion of privacy in the following terms:

"any person who, without justification, intrudes upon the solitude or seclusion of another or into his private affairs or concerns in circumstances where the latter has a reasonable expectation of privacy should be liable under the law of tort if the intrusion is seriously offensive or objectionable to a reasonable person." (HKLRC Report, Civil Liability for Invasion of Privacy, 9 December 2004).

A statutory tort of this form would be unlikely to cause difficulties with Article 8 and the Convention. The United Kingdom's positive obligation would be discharged by its introduction. The Article 8 rights of private parties would be protected by means of civil claims under this tort. The advantages of a new statutory tort are that it would enable clearer boundaries to be defined (although some flexibility would, of course, have to be retained). It would also give the privacy law the democratic legitimacy which the new judge made law of privacy is said to lack. It would, however, not alter the essential rules of the game: the courts would still be required to balance privacy against freedom of expression on the basis of "public interest" considerations.

However, as noted in Part 2, the Home Affairs Select Committee on Culture Media and Sport in its 2010 report, reached the conclusion that "for now" matters relating to privacy should be determined by the common law rather than set out in a statute. This was also the view of the government and – certainly until recently – of a substantial proportion (although not all) of the media. Despite David Cameron's recent comments it seems unlikely that there will be any political will to take this course and it is unlikely that such a tort will be enacted in the near future.

A Statutory Regulator

The third option – the establishment of a statutory regulator – is potentially the most radical. Such a regulator could take a wide variety of forms. The most cautious would simply be to replace the PCC with a statutory body – Ofpress – performing functions similar to those performed by Ofcom in relation to the broadcast media. This may or may not command greater public confidence but would not, of itself, affect the application of the new law of privacy to the press.

More radically, the new body could be given an "exclusive jurisdiction" – subject to appropriate appeal rights – to deal with privacy complaints against the press. It could be given powers to award compensation, order the publication of apologies or corrections and grant injunctions. Such a body could form part of the statutory tribunal system – with members from a list nominated by the media and other groups and a legally qualified chair. Tribunals have more informal procedures than the ordinary courts and less draconian costs regimes. The potential attractions for the media are obvious: less cost and a specialist tribunal. However, there are also obvious disadvantages – it seems likely that more people would be encouraged to make complaints. The "privacy code" imposed by a statutory regulator would have to be complied with – the "naming and shaming" by the PCC would be replaced by effective sanctions.

"Steady as she goes"

The most straightforward approach is, of course, do nothing. In other words, let the judges continue the development of the law of privacy on the basis of Articles 8 and 10. This course has the advantage of requiring no Parliamentary time or difficult drafting. It is nevertheless unsatisfactory because it means that the issues arising will not be the subject of proper public debate. The "democratic deficit" will remain.

Furthermore, the potential developments based on the Strasbourg case law under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights are radical in nature. This case law is developing at a rapid pace and, on the basis of the current approach of the English Courts, it will have to be "integrated" into the new law of privacy. Let me give three examples. First, the Court of Human Rights has, consistently, over recent years held that the publication of photographs taken in public places is an interference with Article 8 rights which requires "public interest" justification. Although in Von Hannover v Germany ((2004) 40 EHRR 1) there was an element of harassment, a series of subsequent cases have found violations resulting from the publication of single photographs, often in the context of criminal investigations or charges (see eg Gourgenidze v Georgia Judgment of 17 October 2006). The fact that a photograph has been previously published will not, of itself, justify its republication (Hachette Filipacchi v France Judgment of 14 June 2007). Second, the Court has extended the protection of Article 8 to the mere taking of photographs – without their publication (Reklos v Greece Judgment of 15 January 2009). Third, it is now clear that the positive obligation to protect private life under Article 8 includes an obligation to provide appropriate levels of compensation for "outrageous abuses of press freedom" in publishing private information such that the victim's distress is properly compensated and the press are deterred from future breaches (Armonienė v. Lithuania, Judgment of 25 November 2008).

In the absence of clearly defined domestic statutory rules and on the basis of the current approach to Strasbourg case law, the English Courts will be obliged to "absorb" these developments in the new law of privacy. Whether or not such developments of the law of privacy are thought to be desirable – doubtless there are radical differences of view on this subject – it is disturbing if they become part of domestic law without public debate via Strasbourg.

It is not necessary to adopt Lord Hoffmann's contention that human rights are national in application (in his April 2009 lecture The Universality of Human Rights) to feel disquiet about the abdication of responsibility for a key area of domestic law to judges from 47 different legal traditions, deciding issues which arise in very different contexts from that faced in the English media. Unfortunately, if Parliament will not legislate and the Supreme Court will not take on the responsibility of developing a "domestic human rights law" distinct from that of the Strasbourg court this is the only remaining alternative.

Conclusion

The new law of privacy has come a long way in a short time. Many issues remain unresolved or only partially clear. What is clear is that kissing and telling and "public photography" have become a lot more legally hazardous. The law of privacy is slowly having an impact on the staple fare of the British tabloid reader. We are gradually moving from a position where anything can be published unless it is forbidden to the opposite – a position where nothing about an identifiable individual can be published unless it can be justified. Under the influence of human rights case law from Strasbourg we are moving slowly but inescapably towards the stricter privacy protection of French or Italian law.

I made similar observations to those in the last paragraph in a lecture in 2009. Paul Dacre quoted them in his 2009 "Society of Editors" lecture and said that they "should chill us all". Chilling or not, they are I believe accurate. Furthermore, such developments are not out of line with the views of the majority of the public which approves of clear rules being imposed on the media in relation to the publication of private information (see the 2010 Reuters report, "Privacy Probity and the Public Interest", discussed by us here).

The alternatives are stark. Assuming that the United Kingdom remains party to the European Convention on Human Rights, the only alternative to abdicating responsibility for the development of privacy law to the Strasbourg judges is for the press and Parliament finally to accept that privacy is a proper subject for legislation. A statutory tort of privacy would enable parliament, after due public debate, to give guidance to the courts on how the balance between privacy and expression should be resolved. A statutory regulator would have the legitimacy and the powers which the PCC lacks and would serve the interest of both public and media by providing quick and effective resolution of complaints. The public, through its democratic institutions, needs to act to provide proper and effective protection for both privacy and freedom of expression. This is, I believe, the only principled "way ahead" for the new law of privacy.

Hugh Tomlinson QC is a member of Matrix Chambers and of the Inforrm Committee. He is also a founding editor of the UKSC Blog.