This caught my eye at Forbidden Planet the other day, and I’m glad I filed it for further inspection. Basically, a British journalist (Dan Hancox) and a British cartoonist (Tom Humberstone, aka The Vented Spleen) are heading off to the US to cover the forthcoming election.

I’m sure I’m not alone in finding the US election process fundamentally arcane and baffling*. In fact, I know I’m not alone – I’ve had American friends cheerily admit it makes little logical sense to them either.

Everything I know about US politics I learned from Hunter S. Thompson**, and so I’m fascinated by the idea of two British guys aiming to do a Thompson & Steadman style campaign trail trek aimed at reporting back to Blighty on the process.

Not just because this is a pretty important election on a global scale, but because (however unwisely) I actually trust two independent counter-cultural blogger types to give me a better understanding of the process than the mainstream media. If nothing else, I’ll be listening to people I can relate to. Or think I can relate to, at least.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in following, they’ve got their “My Fellow Americans” blog up and running already, posting little preliminary details before the primary race kicks off in the new year.

Hell knows we’re going to be bombarded with information about it whether we like it or not – I figure I might as well stick with a supplier that provides a palatable flavour.

[* I'm not claiming the UK version to be any more logical, by the way. It is, however, vaguely more familiar.]

[** Yes, I know, that's hardly fair and balanced. Sue me.]

“Alistair Darling told the House of Commons that the discs containing the highly sensitive information failed to arrive after they were sent in the ordinary internal mail between government departments.”

This is the same Government that assures us nothing could possibly go wrong with a national ID card scheme connected to a biometric database.

Please remember this next time you happen to be voting.

A forthcoming psychology paper is bound to provoke some lively debate on matters political.

In researching the way people reach moral judgements (and finding in the process that an awful lot of it boils down to subsequent justification of instinctive decisions), the psychologists have concluded that people with conservative political attitudes have more subsystems in their moral processing brain centres than their liberal equivalents. Ample opportunity for spin from both sides with those results, I’d say. Watch closely for the first salvoes!

[Cross-posted from Futurismic]

I read a lot of author blogs, in the hope that I’ll absorb something useful. Whether I have or not remains to be seen! But one thing I have heard mentioned a number of times is that sometimes, in a bizarre and synchronous way, you’ll hear or read about something that almost seems designed to be dropped into whatever you’re working on at the moment.

Today, that happened to me, when I saw William Gillis had linked to a story about … well, they’re rent-a-mobs. Literally. You pay them, they’ll go out and wave placards and chant anything you want for however many hours you’ve ponied up for:

“Erento.com stresses that no protester needs to offer their services to a cause they object to, and therefore many may genuinely believe in the protest they are joining.”

That’s just plain weird, like something Douglas Adams might have thought up. It also fits right into my story, which I’m still struggling to finish:

4,094 / 7,500 (54.6%)

At least I’m over halfway through! I’m coming to understand the ‘finish what you start’ thing, now. I’m at a point where I know that the actual writing I’ve laid down so far is terrible, and the plot needs serious structural work. But I’ve also realised that if I go back and try to fix it now, I’ll keep finding excuses not to get to the end … ugh. This is the start of that learning curve they talk about, I guess.

Continue reading “Book Review: ‘The Dispossessed’ by Ursula le Guin”

Modern communication technologies such as the internet are providing new tools and channels for citizens to use in their interaction with governments – and vice versa. Is it time for citizens and governments alike to accept the changed landscape of politics, and begin opening up the ‘source code’ of democracy to closer inspection?

Continue reading “Democracy 2.0 – Opening the Black Boxes of Government”

In fifty year’s time, people will look back and laugh at us for a lot of reasons. Apart from the fashions (“d00d, those jeans, like WTF!!!1!1″), what gets the biggest chuckles will surely be the hopelessly outdated concept of representative democracy.

Continue reading “The Demise of the Demagogue”

You materialise outside your house of impossible architecture, and find to your astonishment that it’s raining. It’s raining boxes. Small featureless cubes, decorated with frantically scrolling computer code, babbling pseudo-biblical gibberish as they cascade onto the landscape around you. Continue reading “Metaverse terrorism”

Straight off the bat, let me just say that when socially and mentally disturbed people shoot up rooms full of school kids, I have no sympathy with their cause whatsoever, except to believe that society needs to find a better solution to these types of issues than simply pumping the people who experience them full of drugs with bizarre side-effects, leaving them with a lot of time alone and hoping for the best.

Continue reading “Screw it, let’s just ban everything”

It was, with no doubt or hyperbole, a day that changed the world. I didn’t see the television pictures, because I don’t own a television, but I was at home with the radio on that day, and remember wondering if the reports that suddenly came through were some sick version of Orson Welles’ ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast. Continue reading “September 11th remembered”