[bloghounds write] doing the rounds today

Cartoon courtesy of Wolfie - pity the writing is unclear here.

Andrew Allison and Donal Blaney both cover the difficulties of going to the loo. Sackers quotes Dr. Faber who says it will be 5 trillion, not 700 billion, Calum wonders why he bothers, Cassandra points the finger at the guilty, Cherie tells us Big Brother is watching and Jeremy explains "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People".

Steve Green discusses the fallout when Brown meets Bush, Deb-acle warns the EU blog-ban has begun, Guthrum sheets it home to Italy in particular, Tony Sharp gives us the latest on this, Dragon Days shows us Donegal, Flipchart laughs at the finger being pointed at the working class and Gallimaufry's suggestion is just too sensible to be taken seriously.

Richard Havers looks at the demise of regional broadcasting, Liz posts junk, Alwyn lays down the Blogging Ten Commandments, Mrs. Nesbitt goes road racing, James is having difficulty with his motor memory, Ordo proves that Burns burns and Sally feels it's time to pack her bags.

Welshcakes has gone all yummy-plummy, Rob at the BSR thinks he might be drunk, Jams brings us the man who saved the world, Wolfie is betting with a man who wants to own an aircraft and Valleys Mam writes of the Cultural Olympiad, as well as on that EU Blog Ban.

Of our fresh faces, Morgan Hen sees a link between Brown and Sauron, Dan McCarthy gives us some tips on leadership strategies and Devika writes of when she looks at you.

[how sweet it is] wonders never cease

Good for football.

[small government] some of the fiscal issues

Tiberius Gracchus asks:

James how can you have a 'smaller government' and eliminate finance - please explain.

Little bit of a misunderstanding over terms here, specifically "finance". Let's also call the concept "limited government". The role of this government can be expressed thus:

Small government is a night watchman. A skeleton crew. A tiny institution restricted to defending our lives, liberty, and property.

Translated into real terms, it means maintaining armed forces, a police force, criminal and civil courts and provision of services, from old age pensions to rubbish collection. It's legislative function is limited - if it ain't broke, don't fix it and its executive function is to ensure that the constitution/bill of rights is protected. The judicial function is to adjudicate on whether this is being done or not.

The U.S. system of the three branches is a good one.

Where the system breaks down is in Trusts and Monopolies, which are the natural consequence of the capitalist way. It is in the nature of a free market to collude and price fix, for the big players to merge and take over. This is the central dilemma. How far can this right to trade be restricted.

I don't see a compromise here as "the thin edge of the wedge" - all systems are a compromise in the end and adjust to realities and new circumstances. Total freedom in the marketplace leads to Monopolies and thus to the military-industrial complex which then presumes to run "the State".

Therefore, the constitution must address this issue of Monopolies and Trusts somewhere within its provisions and other aspects of free market economics. There is an argument which holds that to restrict trade a little is to support and defend trade in general. So yes, we put in anti-Trust laws.

Other than that, government stays out of finance excepting in one particular way - the minting of money based on an agreed commodity, not on fiat paper. The government, the caretaker government does that - not a Fed of top financiers, not a CFR or Trilateral - a small government directly elected by the people.

Having done all that, the government, in its representative capacity, has one other role - to promote small and medium business through its caretaker role. They can act as an agency in this respect, drawing together the knowledge base, advising and helping, not taxing the cr-p out of small business.

So, Tiberius, I meant eliminating the big finance.

[bailout] as sure as night follows day

Did the super-pollies decide at their "sucker" summit to give $700 bn in direct aid to each and every American tax payer, [according to means], to disburse as they saw fit?

President George W Bush has said that legislators will "rise to the occasion" and pass the proposed $700bn (£380bn) Wall Street rescue plan.

Seems not but let's wait and see.

What could it have bought the American people?

No one is delighted the Americans are in this stew, partly of their own making but almost entirely of the banks' greed. What is delightful is that finally the scales might fall away from the eyes and people will see that neither party is worth the time of day and their leaders are in deep collusion with the finance.

In stark, raw profile, the decision on Sunday will show the American people, once and for all, the lie of the land. They are angry, they are hurting and they are after blood. This is middle America we're talking about, of course.

Bad karma for pollies just now. Good karma for a return to realistic prices once this thing is all over and for small government.

[motor memory] when it fails to serve

Once, in the time when I ran two cars, my friend and I went for pizzas with me taking my custom car and nosing it into a car spot near the pizza shop. We did the business, came back to the car, I went to put the car into reverse to pull out and it wouldn't go in.

Damn. He watched as I struggled to get the gear lever in but every time it went into first gear. Hell. This was going to mean pushing the little bus backwards - it was a light car but not that light.

Then he said that he wasn't sure but why was I pressing down, left and forward when he was sure I had pressed down, right and back earlier? Redfaced, I followed his suggestion, went easily into reverse and we went back to eat the pizzas.

Reason for the blockage? Down, left and forward was the way I put my other car into gear.

Muscle/motor memory

Have you wondered, when you play squash or badminton, how such a small racket head on a long stick can possibly move at an angle to the curving ball/shuttlecock and make [usually] unerring contact with it, often onto the sweet spot of the strings? Miracle, if you ask me.

Motor memory is dependent on a number of factors and there's no need to get technical here, even if I could but it's worth a read, just to see the complexity of the whole thing - motor neurons, synapses and so on. Let me not murmur the words "intelligent design" here but you know what I'm thinking.

Here's a little test of motor memory. You should really do the whole thing but for now, try this:

Get someone to highlight the words written in white in the gap below [yes, there are words there] and then say them slowly to you:

Dog - Bed - Smoke - Coat - Road - Job - Door - Shoes - Head - Drain

Now quickly say them back to your partner. They say that if you are normal, you should be able to repeat seven of them but I sure couldn't. If you are in doubt or even if you are not, try the whole of the test.

Imagine people who can't complete this test satisfactorily. There, but for the Grace of G-d ...

[blogworn] many are taking increasing blogging breaks

Is it just me or are fellow bloggers feeling the work pinch just now? More and more blogs are closing and there is also a constant demand for quick grab posts, which pains me:

"Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought." [Alan Jacobs in Books & Culture, 2006]

He goes on to speak about the sphere as a disseminator of information, which I dispute, on the whole considering that an awful lot of blogs simply comment on the news [guilty plea here as well]. Jacobs then adds:

"But as vehicles for the development of ideas they are woefully deficient and will necessarily remain so unless they develop an architecture that is less bound by the demands of urgency—or unless more smart people refuse the dominant architecture."

Have to agree. There needs to be some sort of mechanism which raises the quality of the information at least to published book level [a topic in itself] and yet we can't afford to put up with any form of bureaucratic control or even a Voluntary Code.

Many will argue that the rant is the defining characteristic of the good blog, providing it is backed by research and this does distinguish the blog from the MSM, which has gone over to so-called "blogs" which might charitably, in the main, be called banal.

Total Politics and the like are trying to elevate the status of the blog within the narrow sphere of politics but what of the cooking or pretty-landscape photo blogs? Where do they fit in? They are certainly popular but what s their future? Possibly they'll outlast the text blog.

There is certainly the question of the friendly nature of blogs, a culture in existence where many of us now prefer a list of trusted bloggers to be our first source and initiators of ideas, before going off to Wiki or even to a book, to expand our horizons on that topic.

The local library has been partly replaced by the blogosphere, for how long?

Security expert and tech curmudgeon Bruce Sterling famously quipped at this year’s South-by-Southwest conference that “I don’t think there will be that many [blogs] around in 10 years.

On the question of 'short grab one-liners', concerning what you had for breakfast or where you'll be at 6 p.m. this evening, do you want a steady diet of: "I'll be home at 6 p.m. dear, just as I always am"? In an article, Twitter will die and I'll tell you why, Marios Alexandrou says:

Much of what gets posted to Twitter is not valuable to the community. I'm not saying that there has to be a money-making idea in ever message, but a message to your network should at least be of value/interest to more than one person. I don't need to know that you'll be calling so and so at 9:00pm tonight.

Send an instant message instead or use the direct message feature. Twitter is like TV. You can park yourself in front of it, become really engaged, and hours later wonder what you did during all that time. I had a one week period where all I did was check Twitter instead of checking my RSS feeds.

And what of the blogs which branch out and include a team? Jay Garmon says:

Nearly all great innovation comes from a singular vision pursued doggedly until it achieves success ... Opening your project up to an unreliable parade of volunteer contributors allows for a great, lowest-common-denominator consensus product.

I can't agree in terms of this blog here. Whilst I have a style some might like/some might vote against with their click-out finger, the introduction of divergence through guest posters has certainly upped the intellectual status of the blog, not to mention the contributions from Anon in comments.

Do we go the way of Samizdata, where a central figure controls a group of under-bloggers who are expected to post with a certain stance on things? I particularly like Johnathan Pierce there but he only pops up now and again. There's something a little 1984 about that blog organization.

There's a negative reaction to guest posters in many cases. I won't name two of my favourite blogs but both gentlemen have other regular contributors and I tend to ignore these latter posts and go for the originator's. It's clear why the owners do it - to keep the thing going and to allow someone else the luxury of posting without having to maintain a blog him/herself.

Now one or two of these 'guest posters' are damned good in their own right and I really like their stuff but there is something ... something ... well, I don't know how to put it, really.

What of the corporate blog, very popular some time back? In a comment on these, which could equally apply to blogs in general, the Boston Business Journal says:

"I try to do it consistently but oftentimes I can't do it," conceded Waltham-based Black Duck Software Inc. CEO Doug Levin. "I don't blog for blogging's sake. I blog when I have something to say." Levin, a self-proclaimed blogophile, said he simply doesn't have the time to blog daily. "I used to do it every Wednesday, but then I began travelling on Wednesday."

Does a firm run a one-product, mini-niche site [or a series of them] or is the future the one-stop mega-site? Quadszilla says, on the trend to black holes:

If you’re doing SEO and have an extremely trusted site as a client, it certainly makes sense in the current Google environment to recommend an “Everything for everyone” strategy ... It would take some cash, but buying and transforming highly trusted sites into everything for everyone sites looks to be a very profitable business strategy.

Are we going to see megasites in the future or will the one-person-blog survive and even flourish?