Some joys

Wine Tasting May Be An Art, But There Is Science In The Swirl (Worldcrunch)

 Il giro del mondo in 30 colazioni (dissapore) – photo series - breakfast anyone?

Indottrinamento al cioccolato: esegue Gianluca Franzoni di Domori (dissapore)

Some things political, economic…

Is Germany’s future still European? (Eurozine)

The curious case of German leadership (Centre For European Reform)

Jean Pisani-Ferry video interview on eurobonds (Bruegel TV)

Jacques Delors interview: Euro would still be strong if it had been built to my plan (The Telegraph) – interview with architect of the eurozone

In Translation: Ahmed al-Sawy on the elections – “This isn’t the final bout” (The Arabist)

Some of the thinkers…

Umberto Eco: ‘People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged’ (Guardian)

‘We’re blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We’re not designed to’ (Independent) – Nobel Prize winner for Economics analyzes how we make decisions — I’m going to buy his book.

What does seven billion look like? (Fathom) -  – graphic illustration (saw this on fastcodesign.com)

Good to know

Attempted Malvertising on KrebsOnSecurity.com (KrebsOnSecurity)

One of the heroes

A Video Message from Carlo Petrini (Slow Food) – Italian w/English subtitles – click on screenshot below to see video

Italy’s ‘lost generation’  (Aljazeera) – video

While Rome was burning: Berlusconi and the politics of Italy’s patronage (openDemocracy)

Paghiamo le picconate tedesche (Epistemes.org) – Italian only

Germany’s Central Bank against the World (Spiegel Online International)

Journalists and the European Project (Huffington Post)

“We teach life, sir” – Palestinian Rafeef Ziadah (Antony Loewenstein blog) – video

Paramilitary Policing From Seattle to Occupy Wall Street (The Nation) – call for police reform from former Seattle Chief of Police

Neutrinos still faster than light in latest version of experiment (Guardian)

From Hemingway to Twitterature: The Short and Shorter of It (Journal of Electronic Publishing, JEP) – highly recommend the section on Twitterature.

Noel Fielding: The Scribblings of a Madcap Shambleton (Guardian) – audio slide show, click on screenshot below

From the Failure of Europe to Possible Growth in the Real Economy (Social Europe Journal) – an Italian view of the state of things.

Monti seeks to build new Italian government (Aljazeera) – short news video

The Eurozone Crisis and the Silence of Social Democracy (Social Europe Journal) – excerpt below:

Throughout the 20th century social democrats across Europe had won concessions at national level for workers and citizens. It was here that they forced compromises on business and secured social gains on pensions, wages, health and welfare provisions. It was a settlement that mainstream Christian Democracy accepted after World War Two.  Globalisation has broken that hinge economically, while Thatcherism and neo-liberalism more generally have led the political assault. Currently, across Europe, they have turned a crisis caused by reckless financial globalisation into a crisis of government revenues and demanded a policy of austerity. The European Left has stood open-mouthed and paralysed in response.

“Così ho regalato il web al mondo” (la Repubblica) – interview published today with Tim Berners-Lee in Rome (Italian only)

Wired releases images via Creative Commons, but reopens a debate on what “noncommercial” means (Nieman Journalism Lab)

News24: Sydney papers work round the clock (editorsweblog.org) – a newspaper decides to embrace the pace of the web

Stefanie Posavec On Her Handmade Charts Of Famous Novels (Fast Company’s CoDesign) – data visualisation by hand!?

Dogs, scientists, men: Who needs the leash? (ohmidog!)

La ricetta perfetta: Carbonara (dissapore) – buon appetito! – click on screenshot below for recipe (Italian only)

Surely I’m not the only one to take notice that the bulk of the doomsday talk these days about the imminent fall of the euro is coming either from outside Europe or from eurosceptics.

An underlying assumption of this dire talk, perhaps, may be the idea that eurozone citizens are so discontented that they are demanding return to national currencies. But where is there evidence of this?  Even most Greeks, supposedly mad as hell at EU leadership, reportedly want to stay with the euro (see here, for example).

And, although it’s admittedly an anecdotal report, I can say I’ve not heard or seen either a peep or a scribble of any such San Pietro! let’s return to the lira talk here in Italy either. That is, except for the usual disgruntled voices of the northern far right who, more or less, want to exit everything including the southern half of their own country.

And then this just now in the UK Guardian‘s live blog on the eurozone crisis:

1.47pm: Almost four out of five Germans believe the 17-nation single currency will survive, according to poll for ZDF television. Some 78% of people asked said the euro would survive despite its problems while 56% felt chancellor Angela Merkel was doing a good job of managing the crisis. That’s an improvement on a similar poll in October which had her approval rating at 45%.

How much of a role does the European public play in the rise or fall of the euro? I have no idea really, given the murky fog that constitutes most financial reporting, and the politicians’ backroom political jockeying. But if eurozone voters’ support is needed to drive the currency into collapse, seems to me that’s a non-starter.

Impressively concise assessment of what it means to belong to a currency union — in this case the Euro — offered this week by Protesilaos Stavrou, a young European studies student from Cypress (“Should Germany leave the euro and let others crash and burn?” Aug 27, 2011).

Excerpt:

Countries in a currency union are interconnected, since they have first abolished all or most of the trade barriers between them, their economies have practically merged into a single market and their banking sector, as well as other important sectors of the economy, are organically linked. Severing a part of this “organism” will doom both the part and the whole just as if a vital organ is removed from the human body where both die.

The reason that is true is because the country that opts out will trigger a chain effect in the banking sector and in all other sectors it can influence, which will see private banks and other corporations falling one after the other just like in a domino.

Read full post here.  (Saw this link at Bloggingportal.eu)

One of the key events on which the United States is founded is the historical act of citizens refusing to pay their taxes –  celebrated by patriots as the Boston Tea Party.  So it puzzles me a bit when I hear some of the descendants of these same brave revolutionaries routinely jeer at Italy as a place where people don’t pay their taxes.

One, the blanket condemnation isn’t true. Many Italians do pay their taxes. But for those who don’t, a chart published in the Globe and Mail last Friday offers some justification for the tax-dodging. It shows Italians being taxed at the third highest rate in the developed world (“Tax revenue as a percentage of GDP in the developed world” July 29, 2011).

Tax rates in the US, in contrast, are among the lowest, according to the chart, with the country ranking third from the bottom.

See chart here. (Saw link to this article on Informed Comment here).

A Book Review

That the superrich across the globe are in the process of stealing most of the world’s wealth and resources from the rest of us is by now common knowledge among those who aren’t persisting in turning a blind eye. That superrich defined is the top 1 percent approximately (or 0.01 percent more accurately).

But for those who still don’t know about this mindboggling raid on the human planet and its population, I hope you will take a look at two recent sources of information that describe the process chapter and verse.

The first, thoroughly documented and alarming, is the book “Winner-Take-All Politics” – the authors are two political science professors in American universities (Yale and UC Berkeley), Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson.

As an example of what they are writing about, here’s a 1954 quote they cite from President Dwight Eisenhower (Republican):

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H.L. Hunt…, a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

Unfortunately, as Hacker and Pierson demonstrate over and over in their book, Eisenhower was wrong about his central point. One of the two US major political parties (and the other one also to a huge extent) is persisting in doing just what he described as impossible, and that party is very much still part of political history in the making.

A second source of information about the superrich and their grand theft of all there is to have is a recent article in the UK’s Guardian – “Anxiety keeps the super-rich safe from middle-class rage” by Peter Wilby (May 18, 2011).

Excerpt:

That is the most important point about what has happened to incomes in Britain and America during the neoliberal era: the very rich are soaring ahead, leaving behind not only manual workers – now a diminishing minority – but also the middle-class masses, including doctors, teachers, academics, solicitors, architects, Whitehall civil servants and, indeed, many CEOs who don’t run FTSE 100 companies, to say nothing of the marketing, purchasing, personnel, sales and production executives below them.

Neither Hacker and Pierson in their book nor Wilby in his Guardian article play favorites with political labels. The superrich driving this ruthless and barbaric raid on the planet and their fellow human beings evidently don’t care whether you call yourself a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Socialist, Communist, Anarchist or general apolitical layabout. To paraphrase the pop song, they just want your money, honey, they don’t need your love.

Again, I highly recommend reading these two exposès. What you choose to do once you are aware of the real state of affairs is, of course, your choice. But this is not the time to stand silently by on the sidelines.

Not a bad thing to hope for but, nonetheless, an act of naiveté to think that humanity’s favorite activity of warfare would not sooner or later march onto the Internet. Has the true battle been launched with the case of Wikileaks as the catalyst?

You only have to let your imagination run free for a few minutes to realize how great the ramifications would be for a global society if war breaks out in cyberspace. Can’t think of many people, places or things throughout the world who are not Internet or Web dependent or vulnerable, can you?

Some glimmerings of the beginning shots fired in this article in the New York Times earlier this week (“Hundreds of WikiLeaks Mirror Sites Appear” by Ravi Somaiya, Dec 5, 2010).

Women and Land (Slow Food)

ProPublica Teams Up With NYU Carter Journalism Institute For ‘The Explainer’ (FishbowlNY)

Romano Prodi on the economic crisis in Europe (CNN International – video)

It’s the conversation favorite virtually everywhere you turn these days — Wikileaks? And the inevitable question that arises — are you for or against?

Yesterday Forbes posted online an article and in-depth Q&A with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange  (“An Interview With WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange” by Andy Greenberg).

Greenberg writes:

Admire Assange or revile him, he is the prophet of a coming age of involuntary transparency. Having exposed military misconduct on a grand scale, he is now gunning for corporate America. Does Assange have unpublished, damaging documents on pharmaceutical companies? Yes, he says. Finance? Yes, many more than the single bank scandal we’ve been discussing. Energy? Plenty, on everything from BP to an Albanian oil firm that he says attempted to sabotage its competitors’ wells…

Read Greenberg’s article here. His Q&A with Assange is here.