Road Trip For Christmas

DEAR VALUABLE READER

MERRY CHRISTMAS

AVATAR - Old Tales Are Not In Kansas Any More

If you like Science Fiction, tales of the old west, stories of discovery, little guys taking on the big guys plots (although the little guys are 10ft tall), absolutely superb 3-D technology and are willing to forgive a screenplay that doesn't match the rest of the movie in quality. Go see Avatar.




I'm not going to play spoiler so read on. I have always been a fan of Science Fiction stories and movies are the perfect media for film makers to tell futuristic tales using technology. But I have never seen anything like this. Sigourney Weaver is only "name" in the movie, the star is the movie itself.

It reminded me of Little Big Man; Last Of The Mohicans; New World and any story of colonial exploitation of an indigenous people. The bad guy in this movie is not a country, a colonial power or an overbearing military, but a greedy corporation that hires mercenaries to do its dirty work. Echoes of Blackwater and our very own oil companies.

The digital world that director James Cameron creates is a wonderful achievement. My parents used to tell me of how blown away they were when they saw The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind back in 1939. Silent movies were still being shown in cinemas at that time, and then, all of sudden, movie making was changed. Seventy years later film making has again taken a new direction.

Wondeful, Wonderful, Copenhagen

First written about a 1,000 years ago, Copenhagen became the capital of Denmark in the early 15th century. Denmark was a greater European power then than it is today, it included Norway and Iceland among its territories.

The biggest island in the world not to be a continent, Greenland, is still a Danish protectorate. Copenhagen's name means Merchant's Harbor dating back to its importance as a center of maritime trade. With the completion of the transnational Oresund Bridge in 2000, linking the Swedish port city of Malmo with the Danish capital, Copenhagen has increased its influence in Scandinavia as an important center of trade, media, science and tourism.

In 1807 a preemptive attack by the British Navy on Copenhagen, known as the Battle of Copenhagen, was designed to capture or destroy the Danish-Norwegian Navy, to stop them falling into the hands of Napoleon Bonaparte's French ships, who the British feared wanted to control an entrance to the Baltic, and they were worried the French were about the invade Denmark. A preemptive attack on a military inferior, wouldn't happen in this day and age would it.

In another preemptive attack, Nazi Germany invaded Denmark in April 1940. Danes were divided about the intentions of the Nazis, who regard them as fellow Aryans. Hitler wanted to make them a model protectorate, to show the world what a Nazi controlled Europe would be like. Some Danes joined the German Army but others joined the resistance and when Danish Jews were ordered to be deported to Germany, the population saved them by shipping them to neutral Sweden. 99% of Danish Jews survived the holocaust. Sabotage and violence increased along with strikes other symbolic resistance. In May 1945, British forces liberated Denmark from Nazi rule.

There is another invasion of Copenhagen going on right now, it is The United Nations Conference on Climate Change Summit. Every country, large and small, the big polluters and the zero polluters are all there to talk about what everybody else should be doing. Lots of protests, lots of arrests, maybe a trip to LegoLand, the Danish equivalent of Disney Land and a visit to the Carlsburg Brewery and buy a Hans Christian Andersen T-shirt. Decide nothing, promise lots of money and go home.

36% of the citizens of Copenhagen go work by bicycle.

Obama Buys San Francisco Forty-Niners

Imagine if that headline was true. Imagine also, he owned TV and publishing that reached 50% of the population and major banking, publishing and PR companies too. If he were Italian, Obama would be qualified to be Prime Minister.



Italy is a Parliamentary Republic and by American standards, not a very stable one. Since the Republic's formation in 1946, the elected President has dissolved the government about 50 times. On two occasions, 12 days is all a government has been able to hold on to power.

Georgio Napolitano is the current President of the Republic. He appoints a Council of Ministers from the many political parties in Italy, he also appoints the President of the Council of Ministers, that person becomes Prime Minister, and right now that Prime Minister is Silvio Berlusconi.

The Prime Minister wields the majority of political power, while the President performs Head of State duties and is the guardian of the their Constitution.

Berlusconi owns the world renowned soccer team AC Milan, a team with a fan base that would make any American sports franchise drool, about 20 million registered fans world-wide. He owns media, banking, publishing, PR and construction companies.

Italy has the lowest ranking of press freedom in Europe, along with Turkey. In 2009, Freedom House judged Italy's press to be partly free, worse than the old Soviet satellites of Poland and the Czech and Slovak Republics.

He has had many legal problems but has yet to be convicted. He is accused of having ties with the Italian Mafia, which he denies. His personal life is always in the news, children with one wife, out of wedlock children, divorce, children with famous actress, marriage again, divorce, cavorting with young girls, and last week he was attacked.

A man emerged from a crowd and threw a statue of Milan Cathedral at him, breaking his nose, two teeth and causing a bloody mess. Should make him a little less kissable for a while.




Italian politics is like a TV show you watch for a few minutes but switch channels because the plot is not believable. Berlusconi is stranger than fiction.

Internet Bill Of Rights Or Internet Bill of Wrongs

Who is charge of the internet In the United States? Right now nobody. But by spring 2010 somebody could be. The Federal Communications Commission will be presenting rules for internet usage, they are becoming known as The Internet Bill Of Rights.


Currently the internet is a free-for-all, billions of users world-wide, tens of billions of web pages, everybody is treated equally. No favoritism. The weakness waiting to be exploited is ISPs, or Internet Service Providers. Six telephone and cable companies control 65% of America's 85 million broadband users, the big four being AT&T; Comcast; Time-Warner and Verizon, they dominate almost half.

What the big Telecoms want to do is create a two-speed internet, with their customers paying extra for the privilege of using the fast lane and us peons left in the slow lane, like the difference between dial-up and broadband. They are lobbying Congress like wild men right now to get this in the "Bill of Rights."

The internet has grown and matured in the past 15 years, without any government interference, without any "rights" it is truly a democratic phenomenon that doesn't need protecting, it just needs to be left alone. President Obama promised net neutrality during his campaign, but imposing rules or rights is not necessary to retain internet independence. It's not broken, don't fix it.

The big four Telecoms are making a play for control of the internet, all they see is $$$$$s, if they get it, all I see is trouble. Sign the petition.

22 Million Missing E-Mails From Bush White House Found

The George W. Bush administration's failure to install an electronic record keeping system resulted in 22 million emails to disappear. Computer technicians today announced they have found them.

It will be years before the public is able to see the recovered emails because they now have to go through the National Archives process for releasing Presidential and agency records.

It seems that the Bush/Cheney White House had something to hide, wonder what that could be. All White House administrations have a legal obligation to keep and preserve electronic records. Sheila Shadmand, a lawyer representing the National Security Archive said:  the Obama administration is making an effort to clean up "the electronic data mess left behind by the prior administration."

It's going to be years, but maybe we might get a little truth at last.

Obama Hits Out Of The Park Home Run

Whether you agree or not on the subject of President Obama being worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, his acceptance speech was nothing short of brilliant.



Full of humility and muscular imagery, he won over many critics who were waiting to see how he handled the occasion, considering weeks after the announcement of his win, he committed 30,000 troops to go to Afghanistan..

He is the 3rd sitting President to have been awarded the prize, Teddy Roosevelt was the first, and Woodrow Wilson. Jimmy Carter won after leaving office. Obama is the 21st American to win the coveted award.

The Curie family won five Nobel awards, spread over several years. Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. She won for physics, a few years later she won another, for chemistry.

In all categories, citizens of the United States have won 320 Nobel Prizes, with the U.K. a distant second with 116 and Germany with 103. China has won six, four of them in physics. Russia has twenty-two.