In the city-state of Athens, about 3,000 years ago, Athenian citizens used to meet regularly at the “town centre” to announce projects, discuss politics and military affairs and decide on matters of common interest. What was so peculiar about this congregation – that came to be known as ‘agora’ – is that all Athenian citizens had the right to speak their own mind about almost anything and address their fellow citizens and when a decision had to be made, no one’s vote mattered more than someone else’s. And everything took place out in the open. No single Athenian was privileged in terms of public exposure and all opinions voiced at the agora were judged against their own merit. The ability to speak, raise objections, comment and criticise was equally distributed among all attendants and power to decide on the action to be taken based on what was previously debated was also equally distributed. Some embraced their fellow citizens’ ideas, and joined a civic coalition to take immediate action provided of course that they managed to convince the majority while others detached themselves emotionally from these very same ideas and went on to counter argue and oppose them. Conflict, enthusiasm, dispute and all sorts of verbal demonstrations of human emotions and feelings were evident and encouraged. Legendary war campaigns, marches to the battlefield and critical community issues related to, say, education, sports or arts, were decided in this way rather than at the headquarters of the army general or at the palace of the ruling king (besides, there was no king). And that is what Democracy means in Greek: the public holds the power reigns. However, the organisation of the agora conveyed also something else: that power shifted to where knowledge resided. Athenians were empowered by the abstract, yet real social infrastructure of the agora to publicly demonstrate their knowledge by means of articulating arguments in favour or against of certain propositions and on these premises, to gain the respect, the approval and the support of everyone engaged in the conversation. Yet it is striking how distant this archaic “town centre” looks from the one we are familiar with. Time went by and approximately 2,150 years ago ancient Greek forces were outperformed by the Roman army in the battlefield, and Athens was eventually taken over by the Roman Empire. The Athenian democracy and agora did not ever recover. Never again in human history had people had this staggering ability to collectively make decisions and collectively implement them.

How, then, does a nation deal with debts that so greatly outrun its ability to pay? There are basically only five strategies. All are unappealing. Most are calamitous.

The most difficult strategy is, not surprisingly, the honest one: raise taxes and pay your bills. This is what King George III did following the Seven Years War with France in 1763. England had quadrupled its national debt in fighting the War and needed money to pay it off. It turned to the richest people in the realm, the Colonists, and began taxing paper, glass, paint, lead, and, of course, tea. The result, as we know, was the American Revolution.

It was the same strategy-raising taxes on the rich-that Louis XVI attempted in 1789. The French national debt had grown 10 fold under the pharoic opulence of Louis's grandfather, Louis XIV. Louis called the nobility and the clergy together and told them they would have to ante up. They, after all, had been exempted from taxes by Louis XIV in order to buy their complicity in his autocratic reign. Indignant, they refused to pay, precipitating the French Revolution, the most explosive upheaval to established government in the last thousand years.

A second strategy to deal with excessive debts is simply to print money. This is what Weimar Germany did to address the crushing debt imposed by the vengeful Treaty of Versailles. Before it was over the government had inflated the money supply by over a trillion times, leading some to comment that it was a waste of ink to put it onto paper worth so much less than the ink itself. The German middle class, whose assets were held at fixed amounts in government pensions, was destroyed. The collapse gave direct rise to Adolph Hitler.

A third strategy for dealing with onerous national debt is to sell off national assets. This is one of the first strategies the IMF imposes on third world countries that have gotten behind in their payments to western banks. Government-run industries, from telecommunications to water systems, are "privatized" and the country's natural resources are sold off to the highest foreign bidder. This is what Great Britain was forced to do in the aftermath or World War II.

Two world wars in only 30 years had ravaged the British economy and the pound sterling. Facing collapse at home (and revolution abroad), the government surrendered almost all of its colonies, from India and Pakistan to Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. These had been among the greatest wealth-producing properties of modern times, the ones that had made the British Empire what it was. Their loss left Britain a second-rate power with only misty memories of its once imperial greatness.

A fourth strategy for dealing with excessive debt is to repudiate it. This was used for centuries in the early days of the modern world and was revived two years ago by Argentina which brazenly refused to pay some $110 billion in debts it had accumulated over prior decades. More ominously, it was this strategy that was used by the Bolsheviks after they took power in the Russian Revolution.

The new communist government refused to be bound by the debts of the overthrown Romanovs. But the French had loaned heavily to the Russian government for decades before World War I and now were left in a lurch. A cascading series of defaults from one bank to another caused a liquidity crisis on the continent, ultimately setting off the Great Depression.

Finally, there is plunder. When a nation's debt load becomes so huge it cannot plausibly reassure creditors regarding repayment, it must seek some source of wealth, any source, to keep the borrowed money flowing. This, naked predation, is what kept the Roman Empire alive for the last two hundred years of its existence. It is the strategy adopted by the Spanish Empire-silver and gold from America-and which eventually destroyed the vitality of its own merchant and civil servant classes.

Which, then, of the five above strategies will the U.S. adopt to deal with its exploding debt problem?

Description: A technique used to increase participation and understanding of issues. The fishbowl represents an inner group of participants in a roundtable format involved in a decision-making process that is `witnessed` by a larger group who have the opportunity for input and questioning (see also Expert panels and Samoan circles). The fishbowl can be adapted with the use of role-playing techniques to highlight conflicts and alliances, the patterns that connect different points of view and the previously unrecognised linkages between different aspects of issues or problems. The fishbowl process can be modified to allow participants from the wider audience to join the roundtable (Sarkissian, W. et al, 1999).

Objectives: The fishbowl process aims to increase people`s understanding of other people`s perspectives on an issue or proposal, and to allow them to make connections and recognise links that may have been hidden.

Outcomes: Fishbowls can make a large group feel that their viewpoint has been represented in the discussion, even when they have not themselves had any input. Because they hear and see other people`s contributions, they know whether the issue that are important to them have been considered. As well, participants and observers will leave the fishbowl process with a greater understanding of the range of opinions and experiences that exist within their community on a particular issue or proposal. This provides community groups with options for building on commonalities and sharing resources.

Here we are citizens, not subjects.

We, the citizens of the First TRansnational Republic, have assembled in order to globally represent our citizenship rights.

Citizens of our TRansnational Republic are not defined through blood or birthplace but through a similarity in their minds. We therefore ask every person who has an affinity to this and the following principles to join our TRansnational Republic as a free citizen.

The citizen rights include in particular the human rights, transnational principles of justice, the protection of our natural environment as well as the democratic rights of the individual.

In times of growing globalisation the problem of global representation has not yet been sufficiently addressed, the way of the world as well as the faith of the individuals are increasingly determined by transnational organisations (corporations, churches, trade organisations…). There is no comparable political representation system of the individual. The countries of this world cannot – under the influence of these transnational organisations – represent the interests of their citizens; nations cannot act transnationally.

Our aim is the recognition of the First TRansnational Republic by the international community

"My plant read my mind!" On February 2nd, 1966 this realization forever changed the life of the FBI and CIA's then foremost polygraph researcher, and reintroduced modern science to the sentient nature of our universe. On that date the brilliant and disciplined mind of Cleve Backster conceived an irrefutable paradigm-busting scientific protocol. With straightforward electronics that a student or garage-level scientist can replicate, he proved to humans that their thoughts and emotions affect the behavior of their own and other living cells.

For millennia traditional peoples have known that all life forms-plants, animals and even single cells-are not only sentient and intelligent, but that they communicate with one another. This fact got lost a few centuries ago between the mechanistic focus of industrial science and the modern human view of reality that ascribed consciousness only to the human brain. A few 20th century scientific pioneers, like Chandra Bose in India and the Kirlians in the former Soviet Union, had earlier developed technology to demonstrate energy fields and basic emotional responses in plants and animals. Backster's experimental work took the next step and documented a heretofore unrecognized cellular level of interspecies biocommunication.

Some of these repositories have been found. The key figure in their discovery was Severino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana (an alias), who was on the staff of General MacArthur’s chief intelligence officer, General Willoughby. Santa Romana saw a Japanese ship being unloaded and heavy boxes deposited in a tunnel whose entrance was sealed with a dynamite blast.

After the war, Santa Romana and then Captain Edward Lansdale of the OSS (the precursor of the CIA) tortured the driver of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, Japan’s last commander in the Philippines, into revealing some of the Golden Lily sites.

Hand-picked troops of the US Army Corps of Engineers opened about a dozen Golden Lily sites in valleys north of Manila. They found gold ingots “higher than their heads.”

Lansdale reported the find to MacArthur in Tokyo, who ordered him to brief Truman’s security adviser, Clark Clifford.

According to the Seagraves, MacArthur himself and Henry Stimson flew to Manila secretly to inspect the treasure caves. They concluded that the Golden Lily sites in the Philippines contained several billion dollars’ worth of gold.

In order to keep the discoveries secret, MacArthur decided to have Yamashita tried by a court-martial for war crimes and then hanged on February 23, 1946.

Lansdale was put in charge of the recovery of the Golden Lily treasures. The Seagraves aver that Santa Romana was instructed by members of Stimson’s staff to deposit the gold in 176 banks in 42 countries. The deposits were in his name or in one of his many aliases. Negotiable certificates were issued by the banks against the gold deposits.

It was this money, the Seagraves alleged, that the CIA used to buy politicians in Japan, Greece, Italy, the UK and many other countries around the world. It also paid for the secret rearmament of Japan after the outbreak of the Korean War.

In 1974 Santa Romana died. He left a hand-written will that named Tarciana Rodriguez and Luz Rambano, his common-law wife, as his heirs.

With the help of Melvin Belli, a San Francisco lawyer, Rambano filed a suit against John Reed, the CEO of Citibank, for the “wrongful conversion” of some $20 billion of Santa Romana’s gold. The case is still unresolved.

Saturday night at Bonzai in Pioneer Square, a nearly naked woman is laid out on a table. A chef slices sushi behind her, to be arrayed on her torso, bare except for a sheath of plastic wrap and some decorative flower petals. Chopsticks at the ready, patrons line up.

Recent talk about RSS feed splicing and the ineluctable need for filtering open feeds got me thinking about the variety of operations one might want to perform on feeds.

Taking a cue from the operations of set theory we could for instance define the following:

1. Splicing (union): I want feed C to be the result of merging feeds A and B.
2. Intersecting: Given primary feeds A and B, I want feed C to consist of all items that appear in both primary feeds.
3. Subtracting (difference): I want to remove from feed A all of the items that also appear in feed B. Put the result in feed C.
4. Splitting (subset selection): I want to split feed D into feeds D1 and D2, according to some binary selection criterion on items.

The ultimate RSS bricolage tool would give users an interface to derive feeds from other feeds using the above operations, and spit out a working URL for the resulting feed.

I'm not sure how all of it would work, or even if all of it can work in practice. I'm completely abstracting out technical considerations here. While I'm not sure how large the space of useful applications of this could be, here are a couple example uses:

• Splicing: All of the posts on the Many-to-many blog have to do with social software, so it would make sense to send its posts over to the social software channel. Now, since the blogging tool we use for that blog doesn't support TrackBack, it can't automatically ping the Topic Exchange. A workaround would be to merge both channels into a new one. In general, this would enable any combination of category feeds from various sources to be constructed very simply. A feed splicer can also serve as a poor man's aggregator.
• Intersecting: Say I want to subscribe to all of Mark's posts that make the Blogdex Top 40; I'd just have to intersect the feeds. Or I could filter a Waypath keyword search feed in the same manner.
• Subtracting: I'm interested in some topic that has an open channel, but find the items by one particular author uninteresting. (This is equivalent to the killfile idea from good ol' USENET.) Subtraction could also be used if you don't want to see your own contributions to a feed.
• Splitting: One might want to manually split a feed into "good" and "bad" subfeeds according to a subjective assessment of quality or relevance, or automatically split according to language, author, etc. Note that this one doesn't qualify as an example of pure feed algebra, as it involves inputs beyond feeds.

"This essay is about heresy: how to think forbidden thoughts, and what to do with them. The latter was till recently something only a small elite had to think about. Now we all have to, because the Web has made us all publishers."

The Conformist Test

Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.

The other alternative would be that you independently considered every question and came up with the exact same answers that are now considered acceptable. That seems unlikely, because you'd also have to make the same mistakes. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same mistake, that's very convincing evidence.

Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly contains a few mistakes. And anyone who makes the same mistakes probably didn't do it by accident. It would be like someone claiming they had independently decided in 1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea.

If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s-- or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have.

Back in the era of terms like "well-adjusted," the idea seemed to be that there was something wrong with you if you thought things you didn't dare say out loud. This seems backward. Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you don't think things you don't dare say out loud.

"I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them."

We grant everybody the right to construct the microscope using the here-published design for private or educational purposes. On these web pages all necessary diagrams, drawings, material descriptions and software-source-codes are published for free access. While granting the right to build the microscope we make it mandatory that new developments, improvements or other applications of our design are also made openly available for private or educational purposes.

"I've always blended the geeky, command-line-driven Unix style with the mom-friendly point-and-click Windows approach. To borrow a Microsoft slogan, the two approaches are "better together." Each has strengths that complement weaknesses in the other. However, we've yet to achieve real synergy."

"It's clear that that the future of the Unix-style pipeline lies with Web services. When the XML messages flowing through that pipeline are also XML documents that users interact with directly, we'll really start to cook with gas. But a GUI doesn't just present documents, it also enables us to interact with them. From Mozilla's XUL (XML User Interface Language) to Macromedia's Flex to Microsoft's XAML, we're trending toward XML dialects that define those interactions.

Where this might lead is not so clear, but the recently published WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portals) specification may provide a clue. WSRP, as do the Java portal systems it abstracts, delivers markup fragments that are nominally HTML, but could potentially be XUL, Flex, or XAML. It's scary to think about combinations of these, so I'm praying for convergence. But I like the trend. XML messages in the pipeline, XML documents carrying data to users, XML definitions of application behavior. If we're going to blend the two cultures, this is the right set of ingredients. "

We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. And we found more weapons as time went on. I never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. But for those who said we hadn't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they were wrong, we found them. We knew where they were.