Not breaking any champagne though, we can keep that for later.

Back into planning mode for my trip. One thing I'm having problems with is finding decent information about where the diesel engine free green zone boundaries are around cities.

Anyone know a good source, preferably in english for a non-german speaker

keep to the Fen Causeway

Guardian - Gary Younge - The world as seen by Republicans, in a land of myth and amnesia

But race is not all these attacks are about. For the continent they're most likely to tar Obama with is not Africa but Europe - ostensibly a region of economically failed states pampered by overly generous welfare that also happen to be allies. "This president takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe," said Romney. "We look to the cities and small towns of America." It's with this mindset that Romney undertook his disastrous trip to Britain, described in his book as a small island that "with few exceptions doesn't make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy". It's for this reason that accusations of outsourcing at Bain Capital, where he was once CEO, and ads about his offshore bank accounts have made him vulnerable.

For the party most likely to champion patriotism and leverage parochialism is also the party most likely to be bankrolled by multinationals and champion free trade. A significant portion of the Republican base - white working-class men - have seen their livelihoods threatened by the very neoliberal globalisation that their party seeks to extend. Profit has no intrinsic interest in patriotism, and capital, increasingly, is unfettered by the nation state. The capitalism they vote for and the capitalism they actually experience couldn't be more different.

But in the absence of any real opposition to that trend - Democrats support it too - many Republicans reach for the comfort blankets of hyper patriotism and xenophobia and the more accessible targets of immigrants, foreigners and Muslims. Open borders for capital and closed minds for culture; classically liberal economics and classically illiberal politics.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Guardian - David Wearing - Economic policy in the hands of the few serves those few - just ask Adam Smith

Free market economics has taken such a battering of late that one might almost begin to feel sorry for it. In 2008, a cataclysmic meltdown in the barely regulated financial industry plunged the world into an economic crisis from which it has yet to emerge. For Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, "market fundamentalism" was as discredited by this experience as communism was by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Recent scandals at Barclays and HSBC have merely served to underline the point.

Meanwhile the Conservative party, which derives half its funding from big finance, has set about making the public pay for the bankers' crisis, with disastrous results. "Market fundamentalism" told George Osborne that, as the dead weight of the public sector was cut away, the thrusting dynamism of private enterprise, hitherto crowded out by the state, would be unleashed to create jobs and propel growth. Instead, austerity destroyed demand, wiped out the recovery and plunged Britain into a new recession. "Expansionary fiscal contraction" proved to be exactly as oxymoronic as it sounds, breaking the reputation of the chancellor barely two years after he entered Downing Street.

So all in all, there's never been a better time to quote Adam Smith, especially if you're a socialist. Counterintuitive perhaps, but true nonetheless.

keep to the Fen Causeway

In Assisi:

Yesterday was the last day of a three-day festival in my city. It was also the day for which the weather service predicted an early evening storm for days.

Yet, by the time it was thundering all around and there was lighting 2-3 times a second, the music of a concert on the shore of the Danube could still be heard. Looking out five minutes after the downpour started, the crowds fleeing the shore could be seen, and car drivers wanting to leave at the same time, too, all in one chaotic mass. Another five minutes later, I saw that there is a traffic jam on the main road – and an ambulance car trying to find its way ahead... later there was a diversion into side streets. Walking to the station the next morning, there were broken branches everywhere. Later I read that at the shore, the chaos was even greater as people were left on the merry-go-round(!) and tents collapsed on them; but fortunately there were only under a dozen hurt (one serious).

The mayor (the spider in a local web of interests and a silly right-winger) claims that the arrival of the storm wasn't certain in forecasts and that he ordered everyone to close shop ten minutes before the storm hit but some didn't follow. Well, for a forecast he could have looked up on the sky, and ten minutes aren't enough even for evacuation.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

So I got in with some friends of a friend in Vancouver, and I'm going to be going to this four day techno festival thing with them in a week in southeastern British Columbia. I have to pop up to Edmonton to pick up the ticket and between then and the festival I think I'm going to go hike around Banff.

I've been on the road for two weeks and I'm just starting to feel it.

you are the media you consume.