However, I don’t think they can really cure the problem, because we are facing a deeper issue here: the overall overcomplexity in our civilization.

Main drivers of this overcomplexity are bloated states and economy dominated by corporations. Both states and corporations have IT systems today – and the complexity of those IT systems has to reflect the complexity of organisms and processes they try to cover.

The IT system for a national health care system or a state run compulsory social security “insurance” is a very good example. It must be a complex mess because what it is trying to model and run is a complex, overbloated mess – in most cases a constantly changing mess. And it can’t be launched early because it is useless unless it covers the whole scope of what it is supposed to do: because most of what it covers is regulations and laws you can’t deliver a system that meets half of the regulations or 10% – it can’t be used. By the very nature of the domain the system has to be launched as a finished whole.

Plus, on top of all that, comes the scale. If you can imagine a completely privatized health care no system will ever cover all citizens – each doctor, hospital, insurer etc. will cover just its clients, a subset of the population. A system like NHS has to handle all of the UK’s population by design.

Same problem with corporations, especially those that have been around for long (by long I mean decades, not years): scale and mentality. You just can’t manage 75 thousand people easily, especially if they are spread around the globe, in a simple and agile way.

Just think of all accounting requirements global corporations have to handle with their IT systems – but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Whole world economy floats in a sea of legislation – legislative diarrhea of the last decades produced a legal swamp which is a nightmare to understand let alone model a system to comply with it. For a global corporation multiply that by all the countries it is in and stick some international regulations on top of this. This is something corporate systems have to cope with.

What is also important – much of that overcomplexity is computer driven: it would not have been possible if not for the existence of IT systems and computers that run them.

Take VAT tax – it is so complex I always wonder what idiots gave the Nobel prize to the moron who invented it (well, I used to wonder about that when Nobel prize had any credibility). Clearly, implementing it is completely impossible without computers & systems everywhere.

Same about the legal diarrhea I mentioned – I think it can be largely attributed to Microsoft Word. Ever wondered why the EU Constitution (now disguised as “Lisbon Treaty”) has hundreds of pages while the US Constitution is simple and elegant? Well, they couldn’t have possibly written a couple hundred page document with a quill pen which forced them to produce something concise.

But going back to the key issue of whether the corporate IT systems can be better: they can, but a deeper shift in thinking is needed. Instead of creating huge, complex systems corporate IT should rather be a cloud of simple, small systems built and maintained to provide just one simple service (exactly what web startups are doing – each of them provides simple a service, together they create a complex ecosystem). However, this shift would have to occur on the organizational level too – large organizations with complex rules should be replaced with small, focused entities with simple rules for interaction between them.

But to get there we would need a world-wide “agile adoption” reaching well beyond IT. But that means a huge political change, that is nowhere on the horizon. Unless, of course, one other enabler of our civilization’s overcomplexity fades: cheap, abundant energy.

This big picture is – in short – that we humans are damaging the planet Earth, causing catastrophic global warming driven by CO2 emissions due to burning fossil fuels (mainly in cars), as well as having kids, eating meat etc. We are also facing a huge energy crisis, economic crisis, swine flu pandemic and terrorists. Doom is just around the corner, there is no hope unless we submit to a whole portfolio of totalitarian policies proposed by the very same politicians in the very same media outlets.

Apart from whether all of this picture is true (most is not) what is interesting here is a complete lack of any positive program for our civilization.

It seems the only thing our elites can come up with is downsizing humanity by all means possible from contraceptives to choking off industrial production with this whole "carbon tax" scheme. But this is not a positive program, it is at best an idea on how to prolong status quo for those left, especially those on top of the chain. Let’s suppose we will cut human population by 90% (as some "ecologists" – or rather antihuman madmen – are suggesting) – what next? Where is the path upwards, not downwards?

What is amazing is that people in general are not noticing this lack of any long term prospective. They seem so scared of (mostly fake) dangers they see in the media each day they don’t see our leaders have no idea what to do. Or, worse, they have an idea, but it doesn’t include most of us.

All of this is extremely short sighted. Notice that in all of those doom scenarios Earth is being presented as a limited, closed environment – something akin to Eco Spheres. Global warming models, for example, generally don’t factor in the influence of the Sun, space radiation, Earth orbit cycles & changes and so on. So do those who talk about energy and resources scarcity.

The fact is, however, that Earth is just a part of the unimaginably huge and complex system called the Universe. This is our world, not just this tiny rock. And universe is full of energy and matter. Even our own solar system is full of energy and matter way beyond anything we humans may need for centuries. Just the solar energy descending on Earth in the visible spectrum every day is way beyond all energy needs we have or may have in foreseeable future.

Also, as it has been shown, the limit of Earth’s atmosphere is as much a hard limit for life as the water surface is for fish. Fish can’t walk on the land, we can’t get to space without lots of energy and technology – but it doesn’t mean the world just ends there (like they thought flat Earth ends in Middle Ages). Even the limit of Earth’s atmosphere is just an arbitrary line drawn by humans to simplify things – in fact it is a changing continuum between the dense atmosphere on the ground and the vacuum of space above it (and even that vacuum is not completely empty). And that space influences what happens here on Earth in a powerful way – much more so than anything we humans can come up with.

How all that relates to the current picture of doom and gloom? Well – my question is: if we know we’ll run out of resources at some point why we are not trying to get to the resources beyond what is available on Earth? And since when did we forget that for any sane human being fellow humans should come first, before whales and bats? Why instead of trying to kill off humans (or prevent them from being born) – which is what our leaders seem to be busy doing – we are not trying hard to make sure that a) everyone is fed and b) we can have a future in space?

It’s not a problem of technology or money. The technology is there – we have heavy lift rockets, most are just not being produced anymore (like the famous Russian Energia). We even have nuclear technology that could give even better lift and could propel us further than just the Low Earth Orbit, but it never was really used. In fact it seems that when it comes to space technology we are not advancing, not stagnating, but actually falling back.

The money is also there – just the bailouts for the “too big to fail” would have funded NASA for years. This is not mere rhetoric. NASA’s budget for FY 2008 is approximately $17 billion or 0.6% of US Federal budget. The bailouts did cost between $4 to $8.5 trillion according to different sources. That is between 235 and 500 years of NASA’s funding. Or 29 to 63 Apollo programs (cost of whole Apollo program is estimated at $136 billion of 2005 US dollars). And some say the total cost of bailouts etc. is $23 trillion – you can calculate yourself how many trips to Moon, Mars and elsewhere would that buy – even at NASA, known for its wastefulness and reckless spending on bureaucracy etc.

Those numbers show how mad this is, how we risk our collective future by massive misallocation of resources. Can you imagine how much technology and knowledge we could have obtained if just a fraction of those heaps of money wasted on Wall Street would have been allocated to space exploration? How many good, real jobs would have been created – jobs that actually create something, not “service” jobs that mainly mean people flipping burgers and waiting tables?

So something just doesn’t add up here. Either all our leaders just never look up into the sky at night and can’t use their brains for anything other than campaigning – or there is a barrier there we are not being told of. In any case instead of pursuing the only positive path we are being told the best thing we can do is planet-wide civilization suicide.

Which is why I’m sick when I see attempt by mass media and major corporations to create an illusion of grass-root support for the Copenhagen meeting and tax on breathing they want to impose there on the whole world (like this one). What’s really sickening is that this scam seems to work, that people do believe in this whole heap of lies they are being told without questioning them, without thinking. And without realizing there is a positive path – we just don’t follow it, we don’t even consider it.

I think Nobel Peace Prize’s credibility is now completely gone as the committee could sink no lower. Giving it to someone just based on hope he will do something, just based on his slick talk even before he could really take any significant action, is so wrong and stupid it pains.

But it may be a good thing overall. I just hope the absurdity of this idiocy will help more people wake up from their media-induced slumber.

Basically, Mr. Shermer thinks that people who believe there may indeed exist some secret groups – especially within government – conspiring successfully to influence politics, society and economy on a large scale are basically irrational idiots not thinking straight. According to Mr. Shermer such conspiracies are very improbable, because in a large conspiracy maintaining secrecy would be next to impossible. Doing that within government is especially hard, because bureaucrats are incompetent and stupid:

But as former Nixon aide G. Gordon Liddy once told me (and he should know!), the problem with government conspiracies is that bureaucrats are incompetent and people can’t keep their mouths shut. Complex conspiracies are difficult to pull off, and so many people want their quarter hour of fame that even the Men in Black couldn’t squelch the squealers from spilling the beans. So there’s a good chance that the more elaborate a conspiracy theory is, and the more people that would need to be involved, the less likely it is true.

(my emphasis)

Seems like a very good argument: if someone famous for failing at conspiring says it is hard it must be true, right?

But, seriously: is it really the case? Is it really impossible to create a big, successful secret operation within government – and keep it so for a long time – because people will talk? Let’s examine this claim carefully.

First, it is absolutely clear that such a rule would apply at all only within the context of modern, Western democracies. In Soviet Russia, for example, everything was secret and classified by default, from genocide and mass resettlement of whole nations through the whole portfolio of weaponry development projects to civilian plane crashes. Same happened in Nazi Germany and routinely happens to this day in modern totalitarian states. Who knows, for example, what Chinese government is up to? Certainly not the Chinese people – or shall I call them ‘subjects’?

But even within the Western world large scale secret operations were successfully hidden from public for decades. My favorite example is the Ultra/Enigma case.

Everyone knows the basics – during the Second World War Allies were routinely reading much of German encrypted radio traffic and were distributing intelligence gathered to dozens of Allied commanding officers giving them incredible advantage over their German counterparts.

What’s interesting here is that after the war ended no one knew anything about it until 1973 when Bertrand’s book was published providing the public with its first glimpse of truth. Movies were made and books were written – including scientific research in the fields of history and military tactics – analyzing allied victories in numerous battles without that crucial knowledge. Amazing, but somehow for 28 years everyone involved, on both sides of the Atlantic, was keeping their mouths shut.

And we are not speaking here about a small group of people. Hundreds if not thousands were involved in the operation and knew the Ultra secret. This includes the Bletchley Park staff of a couple of hundreds cryptologists, analysts, technicians and clerks, then hundreds of soldiers in the SLU units distributing the information to commanders (and taking every dispatch back!), commanders themselves and numerous politicians and intelligence officers both in the UK and the US. Not one of them spoke about it for 28 years after the conflict was over.

This makes it even more interesting. It is easier to understand why everyone involved was not talking while the war was ongoing. All were in the military, penalties for loose talk were harsh, press was censored anyway – plus all involved did understand their mission was important and didn’t want to compromise its security. But why after the war? Especially 10 or 15 years after? Germany was divided, part of it was already considered an ally in the Cold War. But somehow no one said a word.

Amazing, isn’t it, Mr. Shermer what Her Majesty’s government was able to do? Maybe they were not as inept as Mr. Liddy?

But even in the US some bureaucrats were much better than Mr. Nixon and his staff at hiding secrets. Let’s just take the case of NSA. NSA – arguably the biggest sig-int organization in the world – was officially created by Harry S. Truman in June 1952. Again, not only the general public, but also large parts of US government – including the US Congress – didn’t even know this organization existed yet alone spied on Americans until 1975 Church Committee hearings. And we are not speaking here about a small organization – NSA employed thousands and its operations spanned the globe with listening posts in Australia, UK, Turkey and other places.

I think those two examples show very well that Mr. Liddy is wrong and so is Mr. Shermer. Conspiracies can be pulled off by government agencies without being compromised for quite a long time even in Western societies of recent time.

Someone may say that both cases are from the secretive field of cryptology and military intelligence. Can there be conspiracies of a different type – ones with political and social agendas on huge scale?

History, again, serves us with an excellent example – Soviet Union and unprecedented social engineering that took place there was exactly a product of such a successful conspiracy. Lenin and his pals were able to use destabilization of Russia following the First World War to grab power, ruthlessly eliminate opposition – and then implement the crazy social agenda they all firmly believed in. No place to explore the details here, but it is a very interesting story in itself.

And yes, it can happen again. One of the fallacies of the modern world is to think that old problems of humanity – wars, dictatorships, cruelty etc. – are a thing of the past, because we are modern – mainly more technologically sophisticated. But technological advancement doesn’t change the human nature which remains strikingly unchanged through recorded history (which is why Greek tragedies are so understandable to us thousands of years after they were written) – it just makes the damage we can potentially do bigger.

Does it mean that 9/11 was an “inside job”? No. It just means arguments of those who say so should be looked at and discussed, not them snared at just for asking questions or having doubts about the official version. History shows that a conspiracy on such a scale is hard to pull off and thus improbable – but definitely far from impossible. But first, of course, one has to know history – without that it is easy to fall for naive simplistic arguments like the one made by Mr. Shermer. Ignorance strikes indeed deeper than paranoia…

The prospect of RIAA thugs laying their hands on records of what all Last.fm users listened to over – in many cases – years is something that should serve as a wake up call for all of us. Even if it did not happen yet there is no guarantee it won’t happen in the future. Actually, one can be sure that one day it will. As we move more of our data to the notorious “cloud” – that is machines we have no control over at all – we basically make it available to the highest bidder. And consequently we loose some degree of control over our lives and privacy.

Conversely, the corporations operating the “cloud” get more and more insight into our lives, views, relationships, material possessions and even thoughts. Then they sell it to advertisers, governments and – as it turns out – RIAA thugs. This is, basically, why all those services are free to use. The users pay for them not with currency but with their data they feed into them.

And Last.fm is just the tip of the iceberg. Think of Google. If you use the whole range of their compellingly simple and easy to use services then they can corelate your e-mails kept in GMail with your photos kept in Picasa, with your conversations on Groups, your blog posts on their blogging engine, your documents and spreadsheets in their Docs and even your browsing history if you use their browser toolbar or Chromium browser. And they don’t have to manually browse through all that to use it – on the contrary, they can algorithmically process all this data and single out people that match a certain profile. Or detect trends. Or predict events. Or map people’s connections.

There is a book out now called “The Numerati” written by Stephen Baker that describes in terms understandable for a layman what can be algorithmically derived from all the data we leave about us. It is all great for marketers for pinpointing their advertising Google and others live off. But it’s also great for secret police and others who want to single out people based on their views or associations. And great for governments who want to know about trends in a population even before they are publicly expressed.

You think Google won’t work hand in hand with the government if asked, that they would resist to protect your privacy? Don’t delude yourself – they will do it the instant some types from NSA or another gov agency walk into their offices. And they even do it publicly now. Yeah, I know, it is just for predicting flu outbreaks and who would object to something this good etc. But same technology can be used for detecting and pinpointing, say, tax dissent (like tea parties). Or map support for anti-Obama politicians – especially given Google’s political views being in line with the current’s administration.

Since I have been using GMail for some time now I think Google knows more about me than any of the people close to me in the real life. I should have moved away from GMail already – the reason I didn’t do it yet is that using their services is so easy and in our busy lives there is little space left for setting up private servers, installing spam-fighting software etc. But the more I see and realize what is going on the more I’m compelled to do this.

For now I’ve uninstalled the Last.fm’s scrobbler – and so should you.

Now, I was positing Google can do the same with political or social views its owners don’t agree with. I was ridiculed by those who still believe in Google’s slick PR front. But the truth is that power corrupts and huge power corrupts greatly. For Google the temptation to manipulate the content stream that passes through them was just too big. And this just proves how bad it is for the public if content streams are monopolized.

And it also shows that corporations are just corporations. Google always tried to be “cool” to hide the reality of what it was becoming, but in the end there is no escaping it. When bad times strike there is no “cool” anymore – there is just the almighty balance sheet. And attempts to hide it are both scary – and pathetic.

This shows the power of content. Kindle isn’t the best of digital readers. And it is ugly. And there are limitations to the content you “purchase”. In fact, a book you “buy” from the Amazon’s Kindle store is not your property, you can’t do nothing with it other than read it on the device. For example you can’t give it to friends. Or print few pages. So in fact it is a long-term lease that will function as long as Amazon and your Kindle will work.

But the Kindle wins with other digital readers and other more open ebook formats because of the amount of well catalogued content – books, magazines – you can easily get on the device for moderate prices. In fact, even my father’s book on composites which is a scientific textbook on an exotic subject is available as a Kindle book.

Amazon clearly had connections and power to work with major publishers to get their books as Kindle ebooks. And they had easier time persuading them to do so, as because of the closed nature of the whole system they could offer publishers more reassurances their content will be protected. Plus, small, independent publishers can use their very simple publishing platforms to get their books to Kindle with very little cost. The effect is that user buying Kindle gets an easy access to a huge library of books, something no other reader offers. That is why the Kindle “brick” has gained momentum many doubted it will ever get (me included). Once again it was proven that content is the king and the key, not devices to deliver it.

The only hope now for open ebook formats and other readers remains the fact that Amazon Kindle is not available anywhere outside the US. That leaves a huge market open for other devices. And lets hope other players will use it, because the future where digital reading is monopolized by a closed platform is not a vision to cherish.

First to disappear are so called “angels” – small private investors that were giving initial funding to startups in their very early phases of growth. Angels became an almost indispensable part of the startup game helping young companies become interesting enough for venture capitalists to look at. Funding their provided was much easier to get (if you knew right people in the US) than VCs and helped startups put together initial business plans, teams and mockups/demos of products/sites/etc.

But, as the crisis unfolds and economy corrects the mistakes in resource allocation to consuming (2/3rds of US economy is – or rather was – consumer based) angels face same problems as everyone. Some of them even used to invest money that was in fact credit against the value of their real estate or stock holding from past successful ventures. As value of both falls down so does their capacity to invest. Plus, with all the pessimism in the media people are even less willing to take any risks with their money looking rather for safety and savings.

But there is an upside to all of this, which I have pointed out in my New Year’s article: all that means better quality. Yes, less startups will get money, but those who will get funded will be those with better teams, better business plans and better, more innovative ideas.

Quantity will go down, so the quality will go up. This is good news, even if that means we won’t get another dozen of new, “unique” social networking sites.

It is true that we cannot depend on government alone to create jobs or long-term growth, but at this particular moment, only government can provide the short-term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep and severe. Only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy—where a lack of spending leads to lost jobs which leads to even less spending; where an inability to lend and borrow stops growth and leads to even less credit.

“Only government” – this is the socialists’ mantra that we hear all too often these days. This time it is the American president-elect Obama speaking just a few days ago.

Good luck to all my Americans friends – you’re going to need it!

Icelandic officials quickly denied that their “new friendship” with Russia includes any kind of military cooperation, for example giving Russians access to an airbase vacated by the US Air Force in 2006. Well, a 19th century Russian diplomat, prince Gorchakov used to say: “I don’t believe in news that are not officially denied” – and I think it very nicely applies here. Have a look on the map and see where Iceland is, how big it is and what resources it can offer. The fact is the only thing Iceland can offer is its strategic position. Except for some fish there is nothing there and I don’t think Russia is in particular need of Atlantic fish. But assuming Russians would get there it would allow them to control strategically important sea routes on the North Atlantic and would help them in their bid for control over the Arctic.

This just shows how wise Russia is playing its cards since Putin’s clique of ex-KGB officers took helm from the ailing Yeltsin. A very, very wise move on their part. And also very worrying for Europe, especially its eastern part.

This madness boils down to belief that there is no objective truth, and therefore no laws governing human societies. Also, only truth accessible to man is the scientific “truth” – that is current theory backed by empiric verification. And since there is nothing besides what can be seen or measured then there is no purpose whatsoever to life other than pleasure and work to get means for more pleasure. Therefore there is no solid ground to base any moral or ethical reasoning on, so basically “anything goes”: all is good and should be respected if those involved in it like it and feel good about it.

This madness leads probably well-intentioned and passionate people to methodically dismantle our civilization’s foundations and cut off its roots.

Western civilization was built on the traditions of ancient Greece and Rome and was deeply rooted in Christianity. In fact it was Christianity that was shaping West’s values and morality for centuries, that was literally driving it. No surprise here – there was never in history a civilization that did not have a spiritual core and that was embracing absolutely everything. Also, there was no civilization in history that was not protecting family by ensuring its special social status and protecting marriage that creates it.

It looks, though, like we are finally getting one. Supposedly rational modern liberals want to built an utopian civilization with no dominant religion, no set of universally accepted moral values (and any reference to supernatural reduced to vague, easily dismissible “spirituality”) and no family as we know it. Reading some of the voices in this discussion it seems there is nothing they abhor more than Christianity and its values and they strive with great success to remove Christianity’s influence on Western societies.

Given the historical evidence it is very unlikely for this experiment to succeed, but it will have its consequences. The problem is those consequences are not immediately visible, but take decades to surface. Some we can see already, but those are the consequences of changes introduced long time ago. We’ll have to wait, maybe a few decades, for the results of what is being done now.

We see exactly same things happening with the economy, where current crisis is a consequence of a systemic error made decades ago in the US. Of course, few notice because only few are really interested in history. People don’t see real causes of today’s problems because for the most part they lie in the past when most of current population was not even living. Ideas tried before are not recognized as such, but rather welcomed as new – and re-applied perpetuating the problem (like the infamous $700bn bailout).

One commentator in the discussion here, Kevin, said that “the ground which humans have built on for thousands of years is eroding out from under our feet”. Cheer up, Kevin – it is eroding, but for the most part only under the Western Civilization. There are other civilizations – in fact if you look at the map of the world most people live in other civilizations. And all of those civilizations with no exception stick to their traditions and values, which incidentally all include protection of family as the basic unit of society. Of those the Muslim civilization is most visible in the West, because it is in fact slowly taking over Western Europe.

So, the brutal reality is that if our civilization wishes to commit a slow motion suicide the world will just shrug. There may be a crisis when it falls but others will fill the void. In fact many around the world can’t wait when it happens, because they hope it will be their civilization that will be more powerful and influential then. Christianity will survive West’s fall as well, just as it survived the fall of the Roman Empire, the passing of the Carolingian Empire and all the kings and emperors that threaded the Earth during those 2000 years since Our Lord has been here.

Nothing of this is news – I’m not discovering anything in this humble post. Wise men saw this coming long ago – like Pope Pius IX or Oswald Spengler to name just two writing decades ago – and many after them. So the problem now is not whether this is happening – the big question we should consider is: is this process inevitable? Can this be reversed? Can Western Civilization be resuscitated? And if yes – then how?

But even if it is not someone who thinks the biggest issue of our time is to push for mentally disturbed individuals to be allowed to “marry” each other and thus helps West’s “slow motion suicide” in his small way is well… a fool.

For example all Google employees who are Muslim or christian or just believe differently than Mr. Brin find themselves in a strange position of working for a company that has an official position on a moral and political issue that is strongly against their own. One could say this is their problem, but I find this troubling.

Is it right for a company manager or even founder to impose his views on all of his workforce in this way? Isn’t this arrogance (as rightly pointed out by CMR)? After all he is not representing those people in any way when it comes to issues like this one. Would it be ok if Mr. Brin said that it is official Google position to support Obama or McCain for president? Would that mean he represents the votes of his employees?

Again, I believe private corporations should be allowed to hire whoever they want or do jobs/projects they want (so I find a recent case of prosecuting a photographer for not wanting to cover a homosexual “marriage” outrageous) or have their own criteria for benefits etc. But all this is quite different from publicly weighting on a piece of legislation pertaining to moral or social questions.

Next, someone called me paranoid for even suggesting that Google’s search results and not only results might be affected by their management’s views. A few words on this one too.

First, please notice that over-reliance on Google can affect your worldview anyway – which is something I wrote about long ago. Notice too, that Google is dealing with lots of content, they are not only delivering search – they also host web sites, they host videos, they host groups, they gather and process news (through news.google.com) etc. They have immense power over what is getting through to the majority of Internet users, especially in the English-speaking countries. This power goes unnoticed, people concentrate on press and TV – but truth is newspapers circulation is down, and TV is evolving towards Internet, not away from it.

Now, call me paranoid all you want, but I find this combination of power and strong political views troubling. I have no proof that Google is meddling with search results as such, but considering supportive evidence I don’t think one can rule this out and continue to trust them.

What supportive evidence? Well, there is even a page on Wikipedia devoted to Google’s censorship and you can easily find cases of troubling disappearances of content from Google’s sites:

• Censored by Google Alerts – Crossed Crocodiles on AFRICOM,
• Google Censors Media Outlet Supportive of UN Whistleblowers.

Then there is the case of Google’s refusal to run pro-life ads while at the same time running abortion clinics ads. This is clearly using the power they have over what contents get through according to their own beliefs and views.

Reasons why all those things happen might be different, but those are all examples of power Google has over content. As I wrote above – add strong opinions to power and trouble is likely.

To sum it all up: I think Mr. Brin has stepped over the line he shouldn’t have crossed. At least for me it means I can’t trust Google anymore to provide fair and equal treatment to all opinions in their handling of web content.

A few days ago a post appeared on Google’s official blog, signed by Sergey Brin saying that Google officially opposes proposition 8 that is to go under ballot in California.

No matter what we think of the issue at hand I think this is both unusual and very worrying if a corporation takes a stand on a social issue like this. It is even more dangerous if the company in question has a de-facto monopoly on search and strong position in other fields that influence what content gets through to the bulk of Internet users.

It is not to say that I’m sure Google is meddling with its search results or – say – YouTube content. But it is a possibility that is hard to dismiss. If Sergey Brin feels about an issue strongly enough to put the weight of his company behind his private opinion (as opposed to just his name) there will be a strong temptation to extend the “fight” with those holding a different position one step further. And if it happens it will be very hard to fight with. First, it would be very, very difficult to prove. And even if proven it would be fully legal, because being a private corporation Google is under no obligation to provide fair and balanced treatment to Internet content representing all opinions on issues of today.

I think in the long run this is a threat to freedom of opinion and expression on the Internet. For now, though, the only thing I can do is use Microsoft’s Live Search. And think of moving my e-mail off Google’s GMail.

But this is not over yet for Ireland – the pressure will now mount, because the euro-socialists didn’t expect anyone to say no this time. Eurocracts will probably try to bully Ireland to get back in line with all kinds of threats – from being “left outside” to economic loses. For now they are expressing their anger by saying that “the NO vote is Ireland’s problem“.

Irish prime minister was already summoned to Brussels to explain himself – which shows clearly what the role of national PMs will be in the future EU super-state. And there is already talk of re-doing the referendum – a nice example of how much respect the supposedly democratic leaders have for the people’s vote.

So, dear Irish friends: hold on tight now!

In any case this is clearly a step in the direction of Google becoming the only search engine known worldwide. That would mean a single entity having monopoly over who gets traffic and who doesn’t. Or, in other words, deciding which content is visible and which is not. And this is for sure bending the worldview of its users – if not intentionally then as a result of the SEO experts’ efforts.

This is why I did choose to use Microsoft’s Life Search instead. Joe Ziz commented asking why switch to a search that is not better and is run by a corporate behemoth too.

You see – the point here is not using something technically better but different. If my worldview – as affected by search results – has to be skewed I prefer it to be skewed in a different way. And the problem with search is that with current technology a good search engine requires resources no startup can build. That leaves Microsoft as the only viable competitor – they can match Google’s resources because they can afford it. Probably no one else in the industry can.

And I’m less afraid of Microsoft’s domination of the past than Google’s (near)monopoly of the present. Microsoft just reaped huge profits by selling low quality software, Google is dealing with a much more delicate matter: information.

Now, the big picture behind all this is whether freedom of speech on the Internet will be preserved or not. It is much more likely to survive if there is not too much concentration – that is if the Internet is indeed a neutral pipe connecting small and big alike and putting them on equal footing. If Google (and a few sites like it) dominates and if Net neutrality goes away (which is something all telcos would love to see – selling access to major sites like TV channels is a great idea for Mammon worshipers) then Internet will become as much a censored propaganda channel as TV and radio have became already.

And this is not impossible – the naive thinking of the early 90ies that because the Internet was designed to function after a series of nuke blasts it will be impossible to censor it was proven wrong by China and its Internet Police. In the end it turns out that even if it is technically doable to go around Internet censorship it doesn’t matter if it is too difficult for the majority of the population.

This is a grim vision. It might or it might not become reality. But it is worth knowing how much the shape of the Internet will affect the shape of the society in world’s industrial nations. Google’s influence is not to be underestimated.

First, make no mistake: I’m not a Microsoft fan and I never was. I was a Linux evangelist about 12-10 years ago and I’m an avid Apple and Mozilla user now. I think MS’s operating systems suck and always did – they are in fact responsible for entrenching bad software as a standard and degrading people’s expectations about software quality in general. And as a company they are as bad as you can get.

So I’m not doing it because I love Microsoft or because I think Live Search is a better search engine. I’m just fed up with Google – and also a bit concerned: my concern is that relying exclusively on Google’s search results affects my worldview too much.

Google has a de-facto monopoly on web search. Therefore everyone fights (with all kinds of SEO techniques) to be on top of Google’s ranking (because almost no one looks further). The effect is that on the first page of Google’s results you are more likely to find someone actively pushing his mediocre content than people who just have good content and no active “SEO strategy”. Also, Google has been known to censor its search results in the past. No matter what reasons they have and whether I agree with them by doing so they try to shape the worldview of millions – including mine – by removing some sites and through that some points of view. Now, that is not ok.

So, I want to see the world through a different lens – not necessarily a fundamentally better one, but at least a different one. And I’ll be actively encouraging others to do the same thing – not necessarily switch to Live Search, but at least throw away Google-Matrix glasses and look at the web from different angles.

It very well might be that while we have much developed since then technologically as a culture we – Europeans – have rather declined. The turn of the 19th and 20th century was, I think, the golden age of our culture – even though the first seeds of the catastrophic 20th century were there already. Good that at least we have those images to remind us of times when right meant right and wrong meant wrong.

Putting the political dimension aside those predictions seem to be based on solid economical theories. In fact, opponents of the Keynesian economy have predicted exactly this kind of thing to happen for years. Just no one believed it will really happen, because said opponents (Hayek, Friedman, von Mises) have been saying that for such a long time people got used to it. But maybe the mechanisms involved required a long time to produce results we are about to see.

And here comes the startling analogy that occurred to me today: same thing happened with “real communism” in the Soviet Union – no one really believed it can fall apart within our lifetime, especially leading sovietologists. May it be so that Western-style socialism will collapse like communism – just a few decades later, because it is – after all – more efficient then communism?

And this is not a small agency, they employ some 60 people and have been recently acquired by an investment fund (who, btw, requires them to be more profitable – read increase the load of cases on recruiters).

This corroborates what I was long suspecting and explains why no recruitment agency I’ve worked with was able to deliver really good programmers, IT managers, routing specialists and the like. First – the best rarely ever look for a job or read ads in newspapers. You have to go after them and fish them out of the universities, this or that language users group etc. And you have to know that a typical geek is a completely different type of fellow than a sleek marketing graduate looking for a job. I bet fishing out good accounting & finance talent is equally hard and in this day and age requires much more effort than just shuffling CVs around as they flow in.

Somehow this – and most other recruitment agencies – don’t get it. Why? Well, because the truth is most jobs – especially many corporate jobs – don’t require exceptional talent and outstanding skills. Filling the seats with half-decent people is a success already so anyone who can deliver them in numbers has a business. That’s why I expect also this agency to grow along, congratulating themselves they do the right thing – and still missing the point completely.

Not only it is totally proprietary and binds you to Amazon as the sole source of content – it also opens up a whole new set of possibilities for privacy invasion. First, Amazon knows about all the books you’ve read. And as the device is on-line all the time through a GSM network and knows who its owner is all kinds of things are possible: from gathering detailed statistics of what you read, when you read it, how fast you do it – and what notes you scribble – to tracking your whereabouts. Since the platform is totally closed there is no way whatsoever to verify what the device does and what it doesn’t.

But not only that – it would be also possible to retroactively alter publications. It could be seen as a good idea – manuals could be updated, errors could be corrected – but it can be also used to alter history, by for example removing mentions of someone or something from a newspaper days after it was “published”. This is purely Orwellian – the Ministry of Truth was doing exactly this.

Overall, I find this whole thing and the mindset behind it highly disturbing and dangerous. This can be best exposed by pushing this idea to its limit: let’s imagine it is immensely successful and everyone has one. Then everyone has only the books that come from Amazon, pays them for the right to read, there is no second-hand book market, no libraries too and Amazon knows who was reading what. All that is totally opposite to what a traditional book is – it is yours to keep, forever, no one knows what you read – you can walk into a bookstore and buy one totally anonymously – and you can lend it or give to anyone for free.

I think, in a nutshell, monetizing on everything and locking users into a proprietary platform on which they in fact don’t own anything, just pay for the right to read, is what I find most repulsive. Circulation of the written word has been limited until recently by the physical limitations of the books and newspapers. Now Internet removes those limitations – it should be an opportunity to make more available for free. There is something inherently wrong with the idea that you have to put a dime in for any page you read, any tune you listen to or any picture you see.

But putting allegories aside – in a startup I think it is the moment when it is not obvious anymore to everyone what their collective purpose it. It is the moment when business looses touch with reality and forgets about the basic product or service it provides turning its attention in a disproportional way to add-ons. It is the moment when the internal communication fails and the management team ceases to be just that – a team.

As I wrote already: communication is a crucial element here. In a startup it is, I think, always good at the beginning, when it is a small group of founders and first hires. Once a company develops past certain size – and especially if it becomes spread geographically – a dedicated, careful effort is necessary to prevent it from deteriorating.

Lack of this effort can be dangerous.

I recently realized that experts are, almost by definition, good at repeating things. That’s how you become an expert – you do something a few times, do it good, and then you are expected to do it as good next time. How you achieve it? By applying known methods and ways of work, by making the situation as simmilar as possible to the previous ones. The more it becomes simmilar the more it becomes predictable.

So experts can be defined as people who know how to bring predictable results by reapplying known methods. And it mostly works, brings those results – except for one thing it can’t bring: innovation.

Even a brief look at the history of human thought shows clearly that experts were always wrong about what is possible and how the things will look in the future. According to experts things heavier than air can’t fly, wars can’t be won by manouverability, Internet is not needed, television is not possible and businesses have to be strictly hierarchical.

I don’t know of a case where a true innovation was a result of a predictable process managed by experts. Such processes work well on incremental improvement of what was invented already. So, experts are good at retaining the status-quo, beginners move the world forward.

It’s not to say that experience or knowledge are not needed. But to be innovative you need all that – and a beginner’s mind. You have to be open to risk, to doing things differently, most importantly to question the established rules, general wisdom, pundits outlook and expert’s advice. If everyone is doing something consider it the first argument to do it differently. If all experts agree – be suspicious and question their argument. If someone says “why reinvent the wheel” – change company.

Retaining a beginner’s mind through our life is probably one of the hardest challenges we face. Human mind has a tremendous tendency to become inert, comfortable in a set of ideas and concepts that become stiffer and more limiting as the time goes by without challenging or questioning them. It can’t be probably avoided completely, but I hope it can be limited.

I hope because I don’t want to become an expert some day…

As I was in Bulgaria just a week ago inevitably I made comparisons between the two. And the overall impression I have is that while its southern neighbor is slugging sleepily the Romanians are charging ahead. The road to the airport, which was being built in March is now largely finished with three lanes and new surface. A huge supermarket that was being built is now open for business. And new construction sites can be seen everywhere.

Bucarest doesn’t feel like a sleepy provincial town (as Sofia does). Far from it. People running everywhere, shops and businesses open even on dingiest of streets, buildings and street corners covered with ads, huge and small. And the traffic.

Thousands of cars race the wide streets or clogg the narrow ones. The driving style is murderous. Everyone is in a hurry, lanes are a mere decoration and traffic lights just a suggestion. Compared to that driving in Warsaw (which I wrote about) seems calm and civilized. Twice I was sure our car will be hit. And most cars bear dents and scratches – the evidence that not everybody is so lucky.

Parking space is scarce. There are no parking meters, so bums sell available spaces in the center. And, interestingly there are quite many new vehicles on the streets, most of them small locally produced sedans called Dacia Logan. You see luxurious cars, but it seems it’s not like in some other countries where late German sedans and SUVs are the only new vehicles you see. That would indicate there is some middle class here, albeit probably rather small.

The differences are not only in what you see on the streets, but also in what you hear when you talk to people. Just one example. Both here and in Bulgaria most people don’t have bank accounts and pay cash. But here our people reckon that in a year it won’t be the case anymore. Romanians open bank accounts fast, also the usage of debit cards increases. And own cashiers will be less and less necessary to collect fees from those who stick to cash. Various companies offer bill payment services at locations convenient for customers like grocery stores, supermarkets and filling stations.

Overall, the mood is optimistic and positive. My feeling is that Romanians work hard to lift themselves out of poverty. The current reformist government seems to be helping more than thwarting this effort. According to our hosts the corruption is being finally fought with and while the govement makes some mistakes there is no doubt they want to improve country’s situation.

The perspective of EU accession seems to be an additional motivation, although they believe EU needs them more than they need it. While they surely have a lot to do before joining they seem to be on the right track.

But I think they should restrain their delight. Some very interesting developments are occurring in Sweden now. Not only is ThePirateBay.org operational again (this time from servers in Netherlands) – Swedes took to the streets to support it and protest the raid! Only few English language sources report about it – fewer than about the original raid – but according to the ones I’ve found several hundreds took part in two separate demonstrations in Stockholm and Göteborg, Sweden largest cities. Demonstrators demanded that seized servers be returned to their owners and criminal investigation against them be dropped.

Now, this is a very interesting development. I think it is the first case when those believing file sharing should be legalized openly manifest their support for a site that helps them do it. In this way their point of view, quite different from the one disseminated by the corporate lawyers working for the media companies, enters the public debate. All efforts to criminalize file sharing are endangered if people are allowed to shun hypocrisy and tell openly that they don’t see anything criminal in copying files from one computer to another. And in a democracy it is not possible to prosecute acts that majority sees as normal, justified and not harmful. Also on the international arena it will be very hard to pressure a democratic, free country to accept other country’s laws without having a backlash from the community.

The events in Sweden and their possible outcome show the political dimension of a simple, technical truth so well expressed by well known computer security expert, Bruce Schneier: „Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.“.

It’s a perfect analogy, since there is a way to make water seem dry – freeze it. The only society in which copyright could function the way media corporations would want it to is a totalitarian regime. Unless the state will monitor the net as scrupulously as the Chinese Internet Police and jail people for filesharing they will do it. And in a democratic society it’s not possible to have hefty punishments for something almost everyone does or did. So either we’ll see current hypocrisy continuing (with everybody pretending they don’t do P2P but statistics showing it is 70-80% of the traffic) or the situation will evolve towards a more sensible solution.

And any search for such a solution has to begin with the recognition that the current system of patents and copyrights just plainly doesn’t apply to or work with the reality of the networked world. Ability to patent trivial inventions, ability to prevent anyone from citing anyone else, sing someone’s else’s songs and the mentality that requires a dime for each word read or beat heard are not an achievement but an aberration of the human development. Sharing ideas, sharing texts and music is something that occurred through history, undoubtedly helping the progress of civilizations. Wikipedia is a most recent example of what can be achieved through free cooperation and sharing.

On the other hand, one has to recognize that the effort and talent of writers and musicians has to be rewarded monetarily for them to be able to support themselves and their families. And ingenuity of the inventors should be rewarded even more since it provides much more than a mere entertainment. Therefore any sensible solution must take those rights into account as well. However, I don’t think it should take into account the big media corporations, which produce an endless stream of mediocre music and movies driven by marketing research and advanced by marketing spending.

I think such a solution must be based on recognizing the contribution of the authors but prohibiting things like long-term contracts binding artists to media conglomerates or advance-buying of rights for works not yet written. Also, dramatic shortening of time period during which a work of art is protected in some way (or an invention patentable) is essential. In other words, a good solution should protect the public and the authors but cut out the parasites. And it should take into account the fact, that sharing of texts and music is not theft but normality, reality of the networked, 21st century world.

I hope that we’ll get nearer such a solution as younger generations, for whom filesharing is almost natural, will get politically active. Recent events in Sweden show that this time might come sooner than I expected.

Bureaucracy is something business owners and managers wrestle with in most countries – although Polish version is really a nuisance with chaotic and ever changing law, hostile tax offices and almost religious affection for paper documents, rubber stamps and copies of everything. In fact our records of all kinds grow at such a rate that we already have to extend the office partially just to have a place to keep the growing repository of printed (and rubber-stamped) paper. Even so it’s something to be expected and hardly surprising – but what is the problem with the people you might ask?

Well, first of all they are very hard to get. Despite the country’s double-figure unemployment understaffing is one of our main worries. I could hire immediately six people on various levels and through the country if only I had suitable candidates. And it’s not that we don’t get CVs when we post ads on the Internet and in the leading newspaper for jobseekers – Monday’s edition of Gazeta Wyborcza, the nation’s largest daily newspaper. We normally get a handful or even a few dozens (although when we advertised for a developer we received two (2!) CVs – the first a week after the ad was published!), but most candidates don’t get past the first screening done by recruiters or my assistant and the rest fail on the interviews.

The first main problem is the overall socialist attitude towards work and employment. The other is the knowledge of foreign languages – or rather lack of it. Despite English being taught in public schools for at least ten years now decent knowledge of the language is rare, even among the candidates for the relatively high level jobs.

Let me explain on an example: one of the positions I’m looking to fill right now is what I call an Infrastructure Manager – a young individual with a few years of experience in building telco or computer networks to take charge of the buildup of our own network infrastructure and modernization of the acquired networks. Fluent knowledge of English is a must on that post because of the contacts with the holding’s management, which is international. Around 80% of the candidates who responded didn’t even claim to be fluent in English on their CVs so – understandably – they haven’t even heard from us. Yet, even those who did claim that they know English well frequently exaggerating. After some surprises I took to starting interviews in English or calling the candidates and starting the conversation in English right away. In most cases the results are not very encouraging.

But languages are nothing compared to the essential matter of skills and attitudes toward work. The latter is crucial. I always argue that an open, willing mind is worth much more than any purely technical knowledge backed by tons of certificates and diplomas. Startups require more than an open mind – to contribute, a special kind of personality is needed – someone well equipped with ingenuity and willing to learn, evolve and develop with the company yet at the same time confident and open to experimenting and taking risks. In most cases people, I look for will be given a field of responsibility to take care of with as little supervision as possible. Being given the authority over the technical side of the company in Poland I need people to whom I could delegate tasks or areas leaving the execution to them. As I use to say, I’m looking for “fire-and-forget” persons, people that will need only a general direction, advice and lots of freedom on their way to achieve their targets.

This freedom can be a blessing or a curse. People I look for will be excited by the freedom and the chance to create something from scratch leaving their own mark on the forming organism of the company. They will also sense the opportunity in joining a young organization and growing with it reaching higher levels of both professional development and, yes, position and income. People I get are in most cases scared by the lack of structure and well defined duties – afraid to make their own decisions, they escalate even trivial matters.

But startups require not only a certain type of personality; they also require a lot of good old fashioned elbow grease. Nine to six won’t do. Counting hours and asking for a dime for every five minutes beyond the standard eight won’t do. And that’s where the other important problem with the candidates in Poland comes – most of them don’t want to work too hard and they say it openly. Quite frequently when asked why they want to change jobs (most work somewhere already) they say with disarming honesty that their current position requires long hours or being constantly on the phone or too much travel and they look for a place that would be “calmer”, as they put it.

The other thing that ignites warning lights in my head is questions about retirement benefits and social security. Maybe it’s just me, but if a 24-year-old asks me about retirement, holidays etc., then I think there must be something wrong with him. People at that stage in life should think in terms of challenges and achieving not look for stability and linear careers worrying about their retirement. On top of that most believe all the media lies about social security tax on payrolls (which is hefty) being their installment towards their future (state guaranteed) pension and they prefer the employment contract over other forms of arranging relationship with the company even though they get less money because of all the taxes.

Of course, that’s their problem as far as I’m concerned, but if during a one hour interview the candidate, when asked “do you have any questions for us”, doesn’t want to know more about his future position, duties or responsibilities but is willing to spend 20 minutes questioning us about overtime, holidays and medical benefits, then he’s crossed off my list. To me, it shows that he is not looking for a challenge, a place to within which to excel, create and contribute. He is merely looking for a paycheck and, for that matter, should go to the post office, a big corporation or some other place where one can thrive for years whilst doing nothing.

Here is another example: we are looking for a Systems Administrator. We have a few Linux based servers and we expect to have more of them as we plan to deploy some servers into the networks we run to keep some functionality dispersed and closer to users. We of course have a development server, a test system and, regrettably, one machine under Windows 2003. All those need a dedicated individual who will not only administer the machines, but also create some things like for example a model for distributing the software to remote servers or a method of collecting and distributing all kinds of statistics from the servers and routers to the network managers.

We found two candidates, both recommended by friends and undoubtedly possessing necessary knowledge, skills and experience. Both interviews were more than satisfactory – that is until we got to the point where I asked them when they could come to work for us. As it turned out, the answer was never or close to it, as they were looking only to moonlight on the side.

The first one works currently as an admin for the local technical university, so he must earn something around 250 Euro per month, he has one small child and another on the way – and yet he won’t leave this position, even though we would have paid him twice as much from day one and then easily up to three times that if he is good. Why? Because the job at the university is stable and they have a good social package. I had to pinch myself under the table to believe it.

The other candidate is 25 and works as the sysadmin for the Polish police force. The pay there is also around 270 Euro monthly, but he won’t leave because of the pension scheme. In Poland policemen and members of other uniformed formations have a special pension scheme under which they can retire after just 10 or so years of service which means that this particular guy would become a pensioner at the age of 32. As he put it, he’ll be “set for the rest of his life”. To me he was a mental pensioner already, at the age of 25 – a rather pathetic sight. I even asked him how much pension would he receive – he was reluctant to say but in the end it turned out it’s something around 250 Euro monthly. Again, I could hardly believe it – if he joined us and worked hard then in 7 years he could run a whole IT operations department here or somewhere else and earn ten times his pitiful pension. But yes, he would have to leave the cozy security of the government job now and work hard.

Those two cases are a bit extreme, but the attitude is common. A job should be safe and guaranteed, not require taking risks or making decisions and not be a burden on someone’s life: certainly not extend beyond official 8 hours, require extensive travel, long commute etc. Most people would be indeed all too happy in all kinds of government jobs where all those criteria are met. No need to develop, no zeal to learn, no will to achieve. And, just to remind you, this is about people in their twenties – not forties, not fifties – people at the start of their adult lives. And the generation that in most cases doesn’t remember communism consciously – most were 9 or even younger when the system collapsed here.

Now, to be fair: we did find a few exceptionally good, young people here. There is my systems guru, who adapts and grows exceptionally and has makings of a good manager as he has already built a small team of developers. We have an exceptional sales guy who is, despite his young age, responsible for finding most of our M&A targets. There is the network operations guy, who joined us recently and shows all the good signs already – and thanks to whom I can now have more peace of mind when it comes to the network structure etc. There is another young chap who takes care of all the complaints, data corrections etc. and is also someone with a future if he continues like that. And there are others… but those are just few sharp needles pulled by pure luck out of an enormous haystack. It took me four months to find the network operations person and, as I said, I still have six vacancies.

So yes, we keep on running despite the mud slowing us down. But sometimes I long for some solid ground…

I think it should give a new meaning to the word “french”. In the 18th or 17th century syphilis was known as “mal francaise” (French malady). Right now “French malady” will become a synonym for a lazy, stagnant society trying to ignore reality…

They are going to have a very very unpleasant wake up one day…

So, back to restaurants – finally, around 4:30 pm I decided I have to eat something smoke or n smoke and walked into one of the the. To my surprise they were not serving any hot meals. It was in a less crowded part of the grounds so I thought it might be that they decided it was not worth it here. I walked another two halls – which took me just half an hour as they were mostly not interesting for me – and walked into another one. Same situation. So, I grabbed a apple pie and some orange juice and walking to the cashier and ask here why they don’t have any hot meals already.

“We have to get it all cleaned for tomorrow as we close within an hour.” was her reply – the whole fair was closing at 6 pm. To my, again, very visible surprise she added “Think of us, poor people, we also want to get home at a reasonable hour” she added. As I pocketed my change and took my tray I said “Thank you – or maybe I should say – thank you, poor people”. “Yes, you should” was her reply.

It’s no news to me. The plain truths are that a country to be prosperous needs people who work hard and with dedication, putting all their intelligence and skills into it as well as healthy families with kids, founded on a core of strong values raising honest, good members of the society. And, additionally, such a society must be ready to use force to protect said values and families both from criminals at home and enemies abroad. And, sadly, centuries did prove that humans need insecurity and competition to thrive (just, BTW, like most other species) – without those two unpleasant motivators societies fall into stagnation. Europe rejects that and what happens now is a simple result of that.

Europe now rejects family life – I’ve read once that in Sweeden only 1/3 of kids born now would reach adult age – 18 years – with the same pair that conceived them – which means that 2/3 of Swedes would have all the emotional scars coming from going through parent’s divorce, possibly more than once. Being a family man is not chic, is not cool, being a mother is even less cool. Singles are.

Europe also rejects the use of force. And within its own borders Europe has now millions of Islamic migrants. They are not particularly worshiping hard work but they are definitely ready to use force as recent events through the continent have proven beyond doubt. Guess what happens if those willing to die for their ideas clash with those not willing to get off their couches to defend what is left of theirs?

Last but not least Europe rejects hard work and competition. EU members could contend for the title of world capital of laziness. It’s here where they have all the absurd and complex labor regulations, all kinds of welfare programs and other such that are nothing more but ways for people who don’t work to live off someone else’s work without, of course, their consent. In Poland, for example, it was announced about two years ago that the total number of beneficiaries of all kinds of state welfare surpassed the number of… employees. It means that everyone working here has some parasite sitting on his back – and the total of taxes confirms that, each employee gets less than 50% of what it costs the company to employ him. Now, how far can you run with someone on your back? Sweden is even worse – you can now get leave from work there by going to a doctor who would diagnose you with work induced stress. Guess who pays for that. No wonder that, as I read in some other article, less Swedes decide now to go to university – why go through all the effort of studying if the only thing you’ll get with a better job would be higher taxes?

Europe has to wake up and shrug away socialism – because that’s what it is. The problem is whether that is at all possible. Europe seems to have lost its spirit, its balls – to put it colloquially – it doesn’t seem to have a mission in the world, a reason for existence, a deeper sense of purpose and aim. Thus all the meager political problems like how to change the Common Agricultural Policy (a great idea of basically paying farmers for not farming) without changing it or what is the approved definition of feta or vodka (I’m not kidding, there would be one official definition of liquida that could be called vodka in the EU and there is a serious discussion reported in the media between groups of countries). It’s nothing anyone could be excited about – and that’s a pity. European integration could have been a great, deep idea but not peddled by the likes of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

Good there would be at least one place left to continue on foundation of European culture and civilization – it’s most vibrant, active and dynamic part since the WWII – the US. What worries me, though, is that it is already infected by the leftist memes too…

Apart from ethical issues and a fresh look at the Palestinian-Jewish conflict (now almost a century old) I see this movie as a story of human tools. Both Avner Kaufman, the Israeli bodyguard turned hit-man and Palestinian attackers in Munich and other young fighters are just tools used by politicians on both sides to achieve their goals. Whether those politicians think they act for common good of their tribe, country or group or just for personal reasons is irrelevant – they need tools and are in position to have them.

Avner’s life is turned upside down because one old woman who happened to be prime minister decided the only way in which Israel could exert justice was by killing Palestinian leaders. And she remembered him as one of her bodyguards.

It’s harder for him than his Palestinian counterparts – he had a fairly normal life before, they were raised in refugee camps with no perspective in life other than joining a militia or other armed group. So, they don’t have a wife to call, a child to remember nor life to return to. Avner’s masters are also much more humane. When their human tool wore down the didn’t dispose of him nor left him to rot – they allowed him to quit and paid him enough so that he could recoup after mission, love of his wife mending his wounds.

But nevertheless it boils down to the same situation through all armed conflicts over the years – the ones who make decisions and put things in motion are not the ones to die and suffer on the battlefields. And, for the most part, only the decisionmakers get their place in history book. Tools don’t.

Spielberg was accused of portraying Palestinians as too humane – I think by hardline, nationalist Jews. But the point is these were no monsters, no petty criminals but living human beings who, like their Israeli peers, deeply believed what they do is just. They both believed in their cause so deeply that in their minds all means were justified by it. It’s this belief we should be wary of as humans because it turns us into monsters by blinding our conscience.

And that’s what I think Spielberg tried to show his Jewish compatriots many of whom seem to think that them being the Chosen Nation and Holocaust survivors justifies their treatment of Palestinians that is based on denying their equal status as human beings and thus startlingly similar to how Nazi Germany treated Jews.