My 30-day Travel Pass ran out yesterday…so this week each trip costs twenty kronor. Apart from the psychological benefits of free trips you break-even on the 30-day card if you average a one-way trip a day…I probably averaged around a dozen a week so was quids in. Today however I had to get to Norrtälje an hour north of Stockholm for a business meeting with Alan at eleven. I was expecting it to cost me an arm and a leg but I did it for three pounds.

The twenty kronor tickets are valid for an hour but unlike the London system they only need to be presented to the system once…on entry...like the Boston MBTA. The out trip was no problem as it only takes ten minutes to get to Fredhemsplan and the Number Four Bendy Bus is waiting at the kerb outside to take you to the Norrtälje Bus waiting on Valhallavägen outside Tekniska Högskolan. But returning is more of a problem because it is touch and go whether you can get back into the subway system within the hour after your 676 bus ride into Stockholm from Norrtälje.

Clive Ogden tells me I have an angle on everything…angle by name angel by nature…so I jumped off the bus at Mörby Centrum…half an hour north of Stockholm on the red line…and entered the Stockholm Tunnelbana system here. I was tempted to jump off at Universitet…on the Mörby-Östermalm line but resisted the urge and changed to the Orient Express at T-Centralen. The thought of losing my ₤3 return fare weighed heavily in the balance.

Nicholas and Andrea reclaim their apartment tomorrow. Neither of them have the disposition to lounge around the place so I will be lucky to exchange a few words in the hallway. As a precaution two months ago I reserved one of our three evenings together for holiday snaps…as in Crocodile Uppsala. Yesterday I used up the final part of my Birthday Present and spent the 100 kronor left on my SF-kort. It was a straight choice between the opening night of Superman or She’s the Man. Superman lost.

I enjoy American High School movies and find superheroes boring. This one had a reverse Princess Ida twist with some Gender-Bending to go with the Bend It Like Beckham theme…and viewed as anthropology explaining Americans I could hardly have chosen better. The audience loved it.

Either side of the film I worked on the Conference Website…a 13-hour working day from 0600 to 1500 and again from 1900 to 2300. At 2200 a Progress Report careened off into cyberspace as evidence that the webmaster was alive and kicking. Work on the website has been going on sporadically in Stockholm ever since my arrival. My e-memo offered colleagues their first glimpse of the web-bits that are in the public domain…but screened from view. It was recommended that they log onto the cesc homepage to view new web-pages like Village Democracy, Leopold Kohr Downloads, radcon III Who's Who and Conference Bookshop…just one-click away from the cesc homepage.

Posterity can take a look too…hello posterity. But webmasters move files around so links that were fit and well on Sunday 30th July 2006 may have lost their position and angular momentum by the summer of 2206 making everything very uncertain. My e-memo encouraged colleagues to follow the action by logging in from time to time.

The e-memo included a Proclamation of Intent to post the homepage within 7-10 days. The web-domain structure is in place…conference, people, books, manuscripts and notices…and there is a sketch in my journal of what is intended. The Real Nations and Real Communities Forums are each to get their own blogs for instance in which each forum paper will be treated as a new posting…to permit comments like on the Magna Carta II blog.

At present the Radcon Bookweb has sixteen entries from eight authors…John Seymour (4), John Papworth (3), Kirkpatrick Sale (2), Chris Wright (2) and one each for Leopold Kohr, Edward Goldsmith, Tom Greco, Aidan Rankin and William Shepherd. Cesc publications have also got in on the act with four e-books…William Shepherd’s Politics of the English Pound and England’s Landed Property, Common Sense from radcon I and Anton Pinschof’s French translation of Thomas H. Greco book on New Money for Healthy Communities…Monnaies Locales. The basic building blocks of the cesc bookweb will be Wordsmiths and Imagicians rather than publishers or booksellers. This is the way to go when niche marketing on the internet but also put the Men & Women of Letters back on centre stage.

Do you remember those halcyon days when we all lived in a Steady State universe? Then Edwin Hubble spoiled it all by inventing the cosmos and providing evidence for the Big Bang theory with its birth and evolution and far-distant edges of our universe skipping away into the oblivion beyond. Hubble had the audacity to collect light
in his telescope millions of light years after it had set off for our little neck of the galactic woods.

Over the edge of the universe and before the big bang are questions that make me a little queasy…opium is a mild narcotic by comparison. But as our telescopes go further out and our microscopes go further in, understanding is further away than ever. Now there are even suspicions that the universe might be a gigantic Hologram…Plato’s metaphor about caves and candles and shadows on the wall may not be so silly after all.

Of course the hologram is still tied up with Superstring and will probably disappear into a Black Hole. But quantum nothingness might yet save the day. One of the problems is stuff. I thought we all had too much stuff. But this is not the view of our theoretical physicists. It seems that as far as the cosmos is concerned an awful lot of stuff is missing. We are not talking Pareto’s 80% here but 96%.

Light Matter we know about…allegedly…but unfortunately it only accounts for 4% of the mass of our universe…the rest is 21% Dark Matter and 75% Dark Energy. It was Douglas Adams who pointed out that if anyone ever manages to understand the universe, it will immediately be replaced by something even more strange...some say this has already happened.

Once upon a time Sabine Kurjo McNeill worked with the boys and their mathematical gadgets at CERN. But she got out before going under…figuring there is more to life than cloud chambers and bubble baths. So I emailed her my frustration at living in a 4D-system operating on a 3D-boundary in Space-Time…and confessed my inability to cope with Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927). I was hoping for enlightenment to be strewn across my path.

Sabine tells me that her framework is metro-logical and based on a theory of measurement that is independent of scale…so it works in the micro and macro worlds. Unlike the theoretical physicists who are content to range between the two extreme Sabine’s focus is on the Competent Perceiver…the little individual…in the middle straddling the two extremities and living in the real world. But our conceptual heavens may be closer together than we realise.

In 1999 while my daughter was wintering in India I lived in her apartment on Dannemoragatan in Stockholm’s Vasastan. I signed up for courses at three different faculties at Stockholm University and by the spring I had collected 25-Credits towards my fil.kand by completing two of the three. My unfinished symphony was a 10-Credit thesis at Stockholm Business School where I got as far as handing in an Intermediate Report before returning to England.

The report begins with the story of a noisy pipe to illustrate transaction costs and then continues: ‘In the Information Technology Sector the knack of keeping down transaction costs may turn out to be critical. The best firms will be hard wired into the country's technical high schools. Ten years hence the value of this study may be a dramatic reduction in transaction costs in the allocation of public and private investment capital in Sweden.

'The foundations of the study are three hunches and a gamble. The assumptions are that two sets of four variables can be discovered or invented; that these can be measured and a model designed that relates these eight variables to some measure of success for the firm as a whole. The gamble is that some form of tag or cookie can be developed that allows these eight values to be embedded in a firm's web site in such a way that they can be fetched by search engine robots and used for company and share analysis. The way to do this has probably not been invented yet.’

Compare that with Sabine talking about ‘meta-technologies for web-based sciences and a new framework for analysing, understanding and learning’. She ended her e-mail like this: ‘Once I have my various software tools I will be able to demonstrate my understanding and make it accessible by making user options clickable.’ Hmm.

Sweden has her own Fear Factories and has no need to import fears from the Politico-Legal-Media (PLM) Complex. Last week Swedes were being encouraged to dive into ditches whenever a storm was brewing. It took me back to the Duck & Cover Campaigns of the early Cold War Years. Lightning can strike you down at any time. Be Prepared!

Ever since reading Ann McCaffrey’s books about Life on Pern I have had a rather benevolent attitude to rain. I really like it. On Pern every few generations threads fall from the sky destroying all life on the planet if they are not prevented from reaching the ground. It is a brilliant piece of invention…Harry Potter standard…and enables Ann McCaffrey to introduce thread-devouring dragons that need bonding when first emerging from the egg and harnessing by elite teams of Dragon Riders to create aerial assault squadrons to attack the threads when they are big.

Even Nils Palmgren…editor of Dagens Nyheter…could not resist adding his two-öre by advising readers that ditches, cars and homes were the safest places to be in a thunder storm. The worst place is under a lone tree, aboard a yacht or on top of a high mountain. The irony is that what prompted the hysteria was the bizarre and tragic death of a knight on horseback at a medieval tournament in Mariefred near Stockholm. He took a direct hit on his helmet and died instantly…with a smile on his lips. Just make sure the car has a metal chassis…and that nobody is on the phone when shepherding your flock to the safety of the family villa. Sweden gets struck by lightning 100 000 times a year.

At 0952 every day this week I have walked to Sundbyberg Library for use of their printer and scanner. You have doubtless noticed my skills at gluing images together with Adobe Photoshop. My one-hour session ends at eleven…but normally I do not arrive home until four in the afternoon. I go out around town gallivanting on my free travel pass. Nicholas and Mischa used to do this when they were nine so my regression back to childhood is beginning. The two things about the Boston subway that appealed to the boys were the escalators and the fares.

Michael Dukakis ran against George Bush for the US Presidency in 1988 and lost. Before this he was Governor of Massachusetts so he did the honours when the Porter Square MBTA Station opened. It was just two minutes walk from Forest Street so I went along. Dukakis was a short man but like many famous Short People…Robert Redford, Tom Cruise, Pierre Trudeau, Dolly Parton…above the waist he was the size of a bigger man so he looked OK on TV.

The Dukakis dedication went like this. ‘I hereby declare this station open…and hope to hell you have enough maintenance engineers for the escalators.’ This showed great foresight. 20 years later the Open Guide to Boston website would say: ‘Porter Square is one of the deeper stations in the MBTA subway system. To exit one must ride either 2 or 3 escalators and typically at least one is out of order being repaired or worked on.’ The fare was a Franklin Half Dollar…so once the boys were through the turnstiles they stayed. Mozambique is just another subway ride.

Ode to the Common Man was my first poem but I have another one entitled Ode on Man Thinking.

Before the beginning
There was living
And the transmitting of life
For that God made woman
And woman gave to man leisure.

From this leisure arose conviviality
Which the women filled
With the good life
Both for themselves
And for their men.

From amidst the good life
Some few men emerged
Preferring honied indolence
Over love or ambition or poesy
Or the pursuit of triviality.

These few men were as gods
And in their conviviality
Their minds found words
And they made conversation
And their hearts were animated.

Conversation gave birth to the idea
And the idea was spoken
And being spoken
Was tried and tested
Back and forth.

And the idea was heard in disproportion
And was stripped of the trivial
And adorned with value
From whence in juxtaposition
Wisdom recognised humour.

And the men laughed
And joined with one another in earnest debate
The idea was argued
With reckless bias
For and against.

Until from those few men gathered together
From the conviviality that gave rise to conversation
And from the conversation that gave rise to humour
And from the humour that gave rise to debate
There came truth.

And the soul of Man
Determined that it was good.’

John Keats wrote his Ode on Indolence in the spring of 1819.

It was February 1982 and I had just returned to Boston from two weeks in Philadelphia on a 10-day Buckminster Fuller Marathon when I met Linda Blitz and fell head over heels in love with her. Three months earlier I had run the Rhode Island Marathon in 3 hours 37 minutes so was looking pretty good.

Linda lived with Marilyn Ferguson’s Production Editor Connie Zweig on Tennessee in Los Angeles. Linda liked me…and may even have loved me…but the relationship was based on a misunderstanding from the start as she believed me to have connections that I did not have…very Pride and Prejudice though perhaps the affair was more Mr Wickham than Mr D’Arcy. But it had significant consequences for myself and for those around me…which ripple on to this day.

Linda was in Boston ending a relationship…on the rebound in other words…not the best time to meet up. My son Nicholas John was six coming on seven and his two best friends at Cambridge Friends School were Jim Sumrall’s son Mischa and Zach Wiesner’s son Elisha…linguistic daddy bonding. I had an exchange going at the time with Elisha’s mother which meant child minding the boys every Wednesday afternoon when the school had its half day.

I was very happy with this arrangement. When together boys of this age look after themselves particularly when they love the Children’s Museum and the Museum of Science in Boston, enjoy hanging out with me when I have MIT errands…and are convinced that riding the Boston subway and escalators is what people do in heaven.

On this particular Wednesday it had been arranged…through the services of the mutual friend Linda was staying with in Cambridge…that we would meet at a restaurant on Huron Avenue after I had picked up the boys from school at midday. Linda had cold feet at the last minute and had to be kicked out the door so turned up half an hour late by which time my Young Arabs were starting to wreck the place. I was getting up to leave when Linda finally put in her appearance…in my memory a vision of loveliness silhouetted in the doorway with the sunlight behind her.

We hit it off at once…Buckminster Fuller and the Anti-Nuclear Movement being our connecting points. An affair was the last thing on my mind as I was happily married. Indeed Ingrid and I were regarded as the perfect couple…the only biological parents of any children in my daughter’s class still together. It was one of those whirlwind romances you read about in novels…something you catch like the flu. But such are the ways of fate that I chanced to be on full-time parenting duties at the time as Ingrid had flown to the Caribbean for two weeks to be with her brother Torsten who had sailed across the North Atlantic. This complicated the logistics of the affair but also made an affair possible.

The trouble was that Linda saw me together with Elisha…the grandson of J.F. Kennedy’s former Scientific Adviser and the President of MIT…Jerome Wiesner. Being at heart a small town girl of Polish Jewish immigrant stock from St Louis Missouri she thought she had made it big in the world of science…her first love…with the European Aristocracy opening before her. Nor did it go amiss that Zach Wiesner had grown up on Martha’s Vineyard with Carly Simon and got royalties for some songs he had written with James Taylor. But this was nothing to do with me. It was by association thrice removed. That’s a rather unfair summary but you get the drift…not easy living up to this.

Linda was and no doubt still is a remarkable woman though I have had no contact with her since the summer of ‘82…dazzlingly intelligent, knock-you-down social personality…bundled together with some insecurity and flawed self-esteem into an irresistible brew. But eventually the calls on my time and emotional energy meant that my work started to suffer. Enough was enough so I gritted my teeth and jetted back to the East Coast…alone. Mary McCartney’s The Company I Keep describes a variation of the type well…one you can’t live with or without. So Real Men eventually give up trying and take the 2-weeks of hell necessary to break the emotional and psychic bonds.

By one of those quirky coincidences-cum-synchronicities my investigation into the killing of Anna Lindh has brought me face to face with the Tides Foundation once again. In 2004 and 2005 they gave $150 million in grants to 6000 organisations. But when I knew them back in 1982 it was as much as they could do to raise the $40 000 a year to support one activist and his family…at least that was what they told me. Tides and Stewart Mott get on well together.

The Stewart Mott Foundation was to Californian 1980s Reformistas what the Rowntree Foundation is to English 2000 Reformistas with everyone around Linda collecting money from Stewart Mott whenever they passed GO. But nowadays the Tides Foundation and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation inter-fund each other in a strangely incestuous manner while pouring enormous amounts of money into the EastWest Institute…since at least 1993.

In 2004 the East-West Institute awarded Anna Lindh their Statesman of the Year Award and in 2005 gave a Statesman of the Decade Award to the strangely funded Right Honourable Tony Blair. This is odd coming from an institute created be John Edwin Mroz…a Council for Foreign Relations member who recently received the Order of the White Double-Cross (2nd level) from Slovak President Ivan Gašparovič for his work on NATO integration. Eugene Pinschof may believe the Austro-Hungarian Empire to be rather a Good Thing…but not everybody does.

Shortly after four on the afternoon of Wednesday 10th September 2003 Anna Lindh was murdered while shopping in the ladies' department at the Nordiska Kompaniet department store in the centre of Stockholm. She was stabbed in the chest, stomach and arms. Her murderer escaped after the crime. According to eyewitness accounts his actions appeared deliberate and systematic. At the scene of the crime the police secured a handprint and outside the department store in the vicinity of a subway station they found a few items of clothing and a knife.

Anna Lindh was rushed to Karolinska Hospital where she underwent surgery for over nine hours receiving blood transfusions continually during the operation. She suffered internal bleeding and her liver was seriously damaged. At first she appeared to have improved after her surgery. But then an hour later complications set in and Anna Lindh was announced dead at 05:29 am local time on Thursday 11th September 2003.

Following the attack an anonymous phone line was set up and a massive manhunt launched in Sweden. Images from the surveillance cameras on a floor above the scene of the murder were released on Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th September. Per-Olof Svensson was apprehended on Tuesday 16th September and detained as a suspect on justifiable grounds…the lowest degree of suspicion. He was released six days later on Wednesday 24th September following the arrest of a second suspect Mijailo Mijailović on probable cause. On Thursday 25th September it was announced that the DNA-profile of Mijailovic matched that of hairs found on the baseball cap left near the scene of the crime and that he resembled the man filmed in the store where Anna Lindh was attacked. Mijailović denied all involvement.

On 6th January 2004 Mijailović confessed to the police that he killed Anna Lindh and gave a full account of the events on 10th September in an extra session of police questioning requested by his legal counsel Peter Althin…a Member of Parliament for the Christian Democrats. From 14th to 17th January 2004 a trial took place in Stockholm and Mijailović was found guilty. Sentencing was postponed pending a psychiatric evaluation which concluded on 9th March that Mijailović was not criminally insane. On 23rd March 2004 he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

On 8th July an Appeals Court overturned the sentence after tests concluded he was suffering from a mental illness at the time of the killing. He was then transferred from prison to a closed psychiatric ward. On 2nd December 2004 Sweden’s Supreme Court overruled the Court of Appeal and the sentence of life imprisonment was re-instated.

Mijailo Mijailović was born on 6th December 1978 in Stockholm to Serbian immigrant parents and had dual citizenship in Serbia & Montenegro and Sweden at the time of Anna Lindh’s murder. On 20th September 2004 his application to have his Swedish citizenship revoked was granted. Mijailovic’s request to be transferred to a Serbian prison was refused.

Swedish newspapers report that Mijailović was released from a mental institution five days before the killing of Anna Lindh, had serious mental problems and had previously been convicted of violent crimes. Mijailović is said to have been greatly angered by Anna Lindh's staunch support for the US-led military campaign against Serbia.

Anna Lindh was born on 19th June 1957 and was married to the Governor of Södermanland Bo Holmberg and had two sons David & Filip. She was born in Enskede, a south-eastern suburb of Stockholm, but grew up outside Enköping. In 1969 she joined the local branch of the Swedish Social Democratic Youth League, with protesting against the Vietnam War one of her top priorities. Here are the highlights of her high-flying Swedish political career.

Chair of the National Council of Swedish Youth Organisations (1981-1983); Member of the Swedish Parliament and member of the Parliamentary Committee on Taxation (1982-1985); Chair of the Swedish Social Democratic Youth League (1984-1990); Member of the Executive Committee of the Social Democratic Party (1991-2003); Stockholm City Commissioner for Culture and Leisure, Chair of Stockholm City Theatre (1991-1994) ;Minister and Head of the Ministry of the Environment (1994-1998); Minister and Head of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs (1998-2003).

Last Sunday Sweden’s biggest national daily Dagens Nyheter ran a front page story headlined Energy Expert Says Boycott Electricity Giants. Roger Fredriksson is the expert and he has set up a Switch website where you swap between a few big purveyors of monopoly services…who fix prices and control the market…and a few dozen minnows in their wake. No great difference in price…three times as high today as six years ago…but fights over the small print. Endowment Mortgages spring to mind. The corporate and regulatory suits love switch websites. Evidence of competition they intone. Evidence of the gullibility of the public and the arrogance of the elites if you ask me.

In the Swedish Media the electricity industry…Vattenfall, Eon and Fortum…has been wringing its hands in its best Uriah Heep manner bemoaning the failure of snow to fall last winter. No snow. No mountain streams. No turning turbines. Sounds plausible? Perhaps. Tragic? Of course. Sweden has been forced to import expensive oil from the unstable Middle East and go cap in hand to the Carbon Trading Floor in Brussels for Emission Permits. Groan!

Stuff and nonsense says Woger. The cost of electricity has hardly changed in six years. But Government Taxes and Energy Company Profits have skyrocketed…and here is a diagram to prove it. Whoops. It proved nothing of the sort. It showed that Value Added Tax on electricity has gone up threefold since 1999 and was now over 50%. Hmm!

So about a fifth of the money Swedes pay for electricity is for the cost of it and the rest is taxes. Is this to make Nuclear Power viable? Fat chance…without lying…currently the preferred option. Or is this what happens when Green Parties join Government Coalitions and start smacking the naughty energy consumers? Hmm! Hmm!

Yet surely this cannot be right? You are right. It can’t. And it isn’t. On Tuesday Dagens Nyheter slipped in a correction on an inside page. VAT and Price had been inadvertently reversed in the diagram. Hmm! Hmm! Hmm!...and Hmmm!

Here is a different approach…in a two-policy package. Government sets the price of electricity to Homeowners…and keeps it constant for a long time…in purchasing power terms like rents in Stockholm…use a basket of commodities. Two kilowatt-hours for one Swedish Krona looks about right. And why not do a Silvio Gesell and sell electricity cheaper the less that is taken from the National Grid...the arguments for Water Pricing apply to electricity too.

For the second part of the package Government sets the price of energy based on cost of production…and the public desirability of the technology. The Danes are already going down this road. Nothing for nuclear power…even a Minus Price called a Tax…to set up a Norwegian-style Fund for Future Generations. Nothing for biofuels which are slaughtering millions of people all over the Third World as Iowa sells its corn to cars. It is doubtful whether this nonsense is energy-positive anyway when you count the energy costs of harvesting. Good way to make gin though.

And for those lovers of Nuclear Energy…ay there be power in them their neutrons…the mantra is: Nuclear Fission Bad. Nuclear Fusion Good. You can use the one in the sky 93 million miles away but for more give each boy a Gyroscope and a Pendulum for his seventh birthday with a big prize for anyone who gets energy from Cold Fusion.

If Real People paint their roof black and rig up a few hundreds metres of copper piping then encourage them. And if you pay Judicial Persons watch them like a hawk…and don’t trust a word they say. While you’re about it put a few company directors before Peace Crime Tribunals in Düsseldorf and Essen…pour décourager les autres.

Mikhail Gorbachev is the cleverest man alive…this from his address at Harvard University on 11/11-2002…for me not the best of times. ‘I would like to quote someone, a person whom you may have heard of, Chou En-lai, the former Prime Minister of China. He was talking to a delegation from France and the delegation people asked him what he thought about the impact of the French Revolution on the world and also on China. And Chou En-lai I think responded very well. And he didn't take too much time to answer. He said, "You know, I think it's too early to tell.’

I have nearly used up three of the six birthday presents from Crocodile Uppsala…four presented and two to come which works out at one a decade. The best present I could have wished for and sufficient unto itself is Nicholas John himself. I am pleased at the way he has turned out and watch his life unfold with curiosity. The next item on my wish list is grandchildren. Andrea has travelled the world with him for seven years so my hopes are not misplaced.

How much credit I can take is a moot point. Any man can be a father but not every man can be a daddy. I made an inspired choice for his mother…although there is the thorny issue of who did the choosing. I am on my third viewing of the Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth’s courtship rituals in seeking to understand this. Mr d’Arcy proposed last night and was refused. Marriage & Misunderstanding would have served as well as Pride & Prejudice…but not as catchy.

Ayn Rand’s first-raters have something of the Jane Austen about them. The two appear together in book lists but few feminist writers have had the courage to tackle a comparison of the Austen and Rand heroes and heroines. The pitfalls of the political incorrectness of both in gender matters is no doubt the reason…but there is common ground in the insistence of both Austen and Rand that the exchange of true value is the only basis for truth and love in marriage.

Before Nicholas John left home in 1994 to go to university…by way of Nambour High School…his mother took principal parenting responsibility while I took over during summer vacations…a long one in America and Sweden stretching through June to September…a mixed blessing for Ingrid as midsummer is a magic time for the Swedes.

Ingrid has all the photographs from our 15-years together and I dropped a subtle hint…as subtle as a sledge hammer as Connie was fond of saying…that a CD of these would make a rather nice present. I live in hope. The apartment is the fourth gift. He did not go to Mozambique to give me five weeks of glorious Swedish summer but not everybody makes their place available when they are not using it. Perhaps if they did house prices would plummet. Housing Benefit has a Six-Week Rule for the property-poor. Why not one for the property-rich? It’s Common Wealth.

On my arrival here three weeks ago alongside the note of welcome was a Svenska Filminstitut Presentkort with 200 kronor on it…and enough money for three trips to Ljusterö and back. Yesterday I spent half my film ration on Davy Jones’ Locker. The film was much too noisy…the current Hollywood fashion…and needed editing and some pretty basic rescripting as the plot is too convoluted. Enjoyment comes from special effects…and Johnny Depp…not from the story line. But films are made for computer games and merchandising so closer acquaintance may solve this.

In 1982 when David Halprin and I were working on the Center for Conspiracy Studies project I used to spend the occasional afternoon relaxing at Harvard Cinema with its rolling two-film daily programmes. You could sit as long as you liked. Some of the pairings were pretty weird…like Singing in the Rain and Yellow Submarine.

Susan May and our four children would often accompany me. Oscars Theatre is reviving the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers classic so I thought of Susan as I walked past the theatre after the film on my way to Fridhemsplan. Phantom of the Opera ran there for several years and made my niece Anna Lundell a minor celebrity…though not for the best of reasons. Anna was pencilled in to crew for Vemara in September 1998 but managed only Visby to Klintehamn after the weather delayed us and then Connie fell ill. Susan sent me a transcript of the talk she gave to the Jackson Historical Society in New Hampshire earlier this year about her uncle Jake May...and tells me she is on the mend.

It was around this time that I met up with a larger than life character O. Richard Maeglin from Muscatine Iowa…a 40-something Huckleberry Finn who had turned fence painting into a successful local enterprise and owned the local bank, the travel and insurance agencies and a warehousing business on the Mississippi which ran through the town. Dick was in Cambridge looking to put some matching funds into the Anti-Nuclear Movement.

David Halprin and Dick Maeglin had a mutual acquaintance at the Tides Foundation in San Francisco who turned out to be one of Linda Blitz’s former boyfriends. This explains why I was drinking coffee in Berkeley wondering where the sixties had gone...and if there was any truth in claims made for it...while on my way to persuade the Tides Foundation to throw some funds at a rather under-researched project so Dick could match them.

The outcome of my Californian trip was some money from the Tides Foundation for David Halprin to carry on doing aikido, Dick Maeglin scuttling back to Muscatine to save his bank as his business empire started to implode in the wake of his imminent divorce…and me high 'n dry with no money, no wife and my romantic love affair on the ropes.

Dick…bless him…despite his dire finances still put his fingers in the till to take out the last few thousand dollars for my sorely depleted coffers which kept American Express at bay for a few more weeks. ‘I promised it and I keep my promises!’ ‘But you didn’t promise it and you need every cent you can lay your hands on.’ ‘I may not have promised it to you. But I had decided to do it. That’s good enough for me!’ Only John Galt and Mr d'Arcy would argue.

Computers are the most alarming creatures. Two weeks ago my fingers were flying across the keyboard keeping pace with my composition when all of a sudden the whole screen flipped through ninety degrees bringing proceedings to an astonished halt. I had never seen the like before. The Help Menu was of no assistance. Knowing what to ask is the key…and you never do. And it had to happen on a Friday evening in summer...so the Microsoft Helpline was no help until eight o’clock on Monday morning when it opened for business. I even made a concerted assault on one of the many Microsoft Chat Groups…a technical one…but to no avail. No one had encountered my problem before.

But I am not one to be defeated by a large dumb beast. So I turned my head sideways and finished what I was doing and then did something else with the monitor turned on its side. Perhaps that would shake the icons loose…or cause them all to fall to the bottom of the screen. Finally I gave up the struggle and took myself off to bed…perplexed.

But I do not give up easily. On Saturday morning I woke up at five o’clock determined to solve the mystery. Whatever else you may think of computers they have one very big thing going for them. Big dumb beasts they may be but they are big dumb logical beasts. Screens do not suddenly flip themselves sideways…contents and all…without a reason…or…forbid the thought…viruses…the very last thing I wished to contemplate.

I had been moving at high speed. I would retrace my fingersteps slowly and deliberately. Perhaps by a process of elimination…now let me assume that my flying fingers had brushed the Control key...something that has happened to me in the past with curious results. After trying every combination of Control+ another key…and discovering some interesting combinations…the screen remained resolutely sideways. I thought fondly of Tony Payne in Rye. Perhaps I should email him of my woes…he would be opening in six hours time. Sweden is one hour ahead of England and it was not yet six. But first one last go at cracking it. How about Control+Alt+F1…or F2…or F3…?

I felt like a safe breaker…which was not far from the truth. Suddenly the beast confounded me again. Now everything was upside down. My son would never believe this and would accuse me of having done all manner of foolish things with his computer. Then that Light Bulb Moment. I had reached ‘R’ when the screen flipped. Just maybe in windowspeak R stands for rotate. I pressed Control+Alt+R again. Eureka! The screen flipped itself round another ninety degrees. Now I was bending my neck the other way…progress of sorts. But I knew I had it sussed. Computers are the most alarming creatures…but they are logical alarming creatures. One more Control+Alt+R did the trick and I was finally back where I started. I breathed a big sigh of relief as a wave of smugness washed over me.

Young…hmm…William was a very happy bunny. He took himself off to breakfast in full Hubris mode before reading the newspaper to keep Nemesis at bay…one of the salutary effects they have. However awful your situation out there things are much worse. And so it was…a normal day in Baghdad with another fifty killed…chaos in Beirut as the Swedish Foreign Office evacuates its citizens and leave the Lebanese behind to be massacred by Israeli forces massing on the border…the world continues to ignore the genocide in Darfur…a tsunami kills hundreds in Indonesia.

The next time I met up with Alan I suggested we try Cntrl+Alt+R on his AppleMac laptop. He was hesitant but eventually got into the swing of it...there is an excellent Macshop round the corner in Sundbybergscentrum if all else fails. Not a flicker of interest from the G4 Powerbook. So it is a Bill Gates…or Nicholas John…Friday Night Special. But don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself…just for fun. But no law suits please when you wake up with a crick in your neck after spending the day with your head on its side and the screen refusing to return to the upright position.

In the spring of 1982 when Linda Blitz changed my life I was working on three Anti-Nuclear Projects. I often wonder whether the FBI has this fact on file. Just in case they do let me correct the record…the evidence of the STASI Files left by the Yanks after the Fall of the Berlin Wall suggests they may need it. But goodness knows what use they make of these records…helps them to place my name on a list so they can turn me away when I show up at New York’s Kennedy Airport? ‘Hi. I’m William Shepherd…real name John Doe…may I come into your beautiful country please?’ ‘No! Have a nice day!’ Next time I will fly into Montreal and cycle into North Dakota from Manitoba.

In 1982 elections were being contested for the Cambridge City Council and David Wiley was standing for re-election on an anti-nuclear platform that included shutting down MIT’s Draper Labs and declaring a Nuclear-Free Zone. I was also busy lobbying for Helen Caldicott...the Australian doctor who had founded Physicians for Social Responsibility...to be awarded the Alternative Nobel Prize. I gave Jacob von Uexkull a private showing of Eight Minutes to Midnight at the Second Fourth World Assembly in Berlin later that year. The third project was with David Halprin…a devotee of the DoJo on Massachusetts Avenue where he practised Aikido…and one of two Harvard Law School graduates I became good friends with in Cambridge…Joe Schmidt from Seattle was the other. David’s day job was as a Massachusetts State Deputy District Attorney. But more about this third project another day.

In the summer of 1982 my girlfriend Linda Blitz wheedled $300 out of Marilyn Ferguson for me to spend three weeks working at her Los Angeles office in a rather undefined capacity. Goodness knows how she swung that one…charity perhaps. This was the office that published Brain Mind Bulletin and Leading Edge every three weeks and it was during my time at Marilyn Ferguson’s office that I bumped into Tom Robbins…author of Another Roadside Attraction (1971), Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), Still-Life with Woodpecker (1980), Jitterbug Perfume (1984) and Skinny Legs and All (1990).

My weak memory of the great Seattle writer is of a scruffy individual…a slimmed-down better-kept version of Michael Moore with standard issue baseball cap before they became standard issue…wandering around behind a huge smile picking up anything and fascinated in the particulars of everything…something his writing reflects. I would be curious to know what he was writing during the spring and summer of 1982.

In my literary record under Articles is Bioelectricity (1982 bmb-la) and under Book Reviews is The Soviet Military (1982 le-la)…a review of three books on the Soviet Military Machine that came out in an issue of Leading Edge that praised the EastWest Institute and its non-governmental People to People bridging across the Iron Curtain. The pieces on Bioelectricity went into a special issue of Brain-Mind Bulletin on the subject.

Another interesting thing Linda organised for me before we went our separate ways after a whirlwind romance was one of ten free places she had persuaded John Grinder…co-author of Frogs to Princes…to provide to anti-nuclear activists on his $2000 weekend NLP Hypnosis course in Provincetown on Cape Cod. Here I met Daniel Elsberg of Pentagon Papers notoriety who was married to the sister of Linda’s friend Barbara Marx Hubbard. John Grinder was in private consulting but had spent much of his life with the CIA…and they are one of those firms you never leave.

The mind technology for doing people’s heads in…one day this will be known as the Mancurian Candidate Defence…was already available in 1982…and it scared the living daylights out of Daniel Elsberg and myself. There was no way to control it. Yet here were the CIA creating skilled practitioners. If it could be used for evil purposes then it would. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. This was madness. Being linguistically based I thought there might be limits to Neuro-Linguistic Implanting…but that was almost 25-years ago. What was going on here?

My Anna Lindh Dossier currently has several appendices. One has tributes and obituaries, another has the facts of the killing, while a third includes essays about plans for the One World State and others about the neocons partial version of Sir Halford Mackinder’s geopolitical ideas...which includes Heartlands vs Rimlands but airbrushes out Landsmen vs Seamen and Locality vs Interests. This is the version of Mackinder that Bush & Blair have been sold by the Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz…Chris Fettweis at the University of Maryland is a much better guide.

Mackinder’s Heartland Theory is taught at the Pentagon. Here is an extract from an article from 2000 in Parameters the US Army War College Quarterly: ‘One of the reasons that Mackinder is being resurrected is because policymakers are searching for ways to deal with the heart of his Heartland - Central Asia and the Caspian Sea - which is a region that has the potential to become a major source of great-power contention in the next century. Some analysts estimate that the fossil fuels in the region will transform it into a ‘New Saudi Arabia’ in the coming decades.’

Talk about tired old generals fighting the last war. Mackinder barely gave a thought to America or China. Nobody in Europe did back then. They were much too tied up in their own little provincial historical disputes. Buckminster Fuller’s One World Island and the Earth’s Seven Oceans is the geography for this century…and confederations of hundreds of thousands of village states will be needed to impose some sense on it over the next hundred years…not a One World Government bombing us all…including themselves…into the Stone Age from 30000 feet, releasing Passover Bombs at Ground Zero for the occasional bit of clinical genocide and deploying Climate Weaponry at 60000 feet…and blaming global warming and carbon emissions for the inevitable side effects.

Governments need to be dismantled and governance dealt with some other way. Imagine if Anna Lindh had been talking this way…suggesting that each American State should have a seat at the United Nations…that the hegemony of the global Gun Running cartel…the UN Security Council…must be disbanded. It would be Olof Palme, Sweden and Vietnam all over again. There are some people who wouldn’t like that. And there are lots of very rich men in the world who can pick up the bill for surgical operations.

Yet it is a strange idea that puts assassinations into three categories: Governments who assassinate after democratic deliberations, Rogue States who sponsor terrorist groups to murder their enemies and Private Mafias who put out contracts and offer Killingry Services. Anyone with money can kill…not so much to order as to prejudice. The police seek the killer but his motive is only a means to conviction. It is not their job to look further. But someone should.

I worked on my blogs from seven until midday. Indeed I have been working on nothing else all week. I say all week but it has actually been half a week as I returned from Ljusterö late on Tuesday night on the 1935 Vaxholmsbolaget boat from Väsbystrand on the north of the island. In fact I got ahead of myself with draft content in place all the way through next weekend. Last time I did this I threw most of it away but perhaps my luck will be better second time around. My problem was to find an elegant…and seemingly casual…way to integrate Anna Lindh Dossier material.

Swedes appreciate the benefits of paying taxes more than most. It helps to have an efficient Public Sector and a Neutrality Policy so not much is squandered on the military. Most discussions about taxes pass through the Smoke and Mirrors department. Margaret Thatcher’s failed attempt to dismantle the public sector had more to do with destroying Trade Union Power than reducing taxes. But the dead hand of government rhetoric went down well with the tax-paying middle classes. The poor have no money and the rich pay to avoid taxes. The Thatcher Legacy is Chronic Centralisation and Administrative Directives instead of Local Democracy. I wonder if she realises.

In England in the 1920s C.H.Douglas…and when will the Social Creditors airbrush out the moustache and drop the Major from his name...would patiently explain to anyone willing to listen that the conventional wisdom about Banks & Taxes was incorrect. The state does not pay its bills from taxes and there is neither rhyme nor reason for so convoluted a financial system…though the myths serve certain interests extremely well. But I will leave Social Credit and the Two Acres and A Pig Policy of the Distributists for another day.

I returned to England from America at record speed on 19th October 1987 riding on the coat-tails of the Great Storm. It cut an hour off my 7-hour flight across the North Atlantic from Boston’s Logan Airport. In Kent and Sussex trees were scattered like matchsticks. In Castle Woods and Oxleas Woods behind Crookston Road where my mother lived 200-year old oak trees were ripped from the ground. And here is an eye witness account from the West Country.

‘I remember waking up in the middle of the night and calling my mum because I thought there were burglars in the roof. She told me that there was a bit of a storm and that's what I could hear. It turned out that so many roof-tiles had been ripped off in the storm that it was my old tricycle rolling up and down the loft in the wind. Our neighbour's car was lying under a tree outside our front door. Mum and dad watched the back garden fence and gate fly around and trap the cat. They couldn't get to rescue her with the wind blowing so a rescue effort was launched in the morning!’

Once the dust had settled and the country got back to normal the City of London started flogging off State Enterprises to the People. Mixed in among the telephones and water was the Channel Tunnel. As this megaproject was all my fault…for bringing it to the attention of all those Cambridge Engineers in high places…I thought the least I could do was to buy some shares and get myself free trips to Paris.

So I sent off for the six-inch high stack of documents and spent two days wading through them. My conclusion was that the French had it right and the Thatcher Government was selling a very expensive Pig-in-the-Poke to the English...and I once prepared these dossiers myself for the scrutiny of such big-hitters as the ODA and the IBRD so I speak with a smidgeon of authority.

As I had determined to be a writer here was my opportunity so I sharpened my quill and set to work. In my view the proposed financial structure was nonsense…and a rip-off. Ordinary people would lose their shirts. It was a very dodgy dossier. I slaved away for a week and ended up with a 15000 word essay in my journal. Unfortunately at this point in the proceedings the dreaded person on business from Porlock rapped on the door and I took it no further.

This is a great shame as there is no end to this folly…railways, water, electricity, schools, hospitals…all have fallen victim to the stupidity of private equity when common wealth is the answer. Perhaps John Edmonds would have given me the funding to denounce this theft of our Common Wealth in a 75000 word book. We worked wonderfully well opening the batting for the Old Blues.

None of this is nuclear physics. Paying for public works from the public purse is often a good thing. Paying up front for something that gives free benefits from then on can make a lot of sense. At least I can run my personal life this way. The 600 kronor I spent for a travel pass when I arrived was money well spent. It makes me wonderfully happy to jump onboard a bus or train anywhere anytime without paying a penny.

So between 1200 and 1500 I rode the buses and trains around Stockholm visiting my old haunts in Vasastan. My coffee house on Odenplan is now a Houston Steak House but little else has changed. The Lord Byron at the end of Dannemoragatan is just the same and so are my 7-11’s. And the Konditori on Odengatan is still the same as it was in 1968 down to the very last detail of the chairs and the layout…though coffee is now 23 kronor.

But I made a mistake in my report from Kungsholmen. The unchanging façade fooled me. Behind it an enormous great retail complex has been created at the junction of St Eriksgatan and Fleminggatan. I stumbled across it coming off the subway. This is the freakiest thing of all…a complete makeover behind an unchanging façade. Spooky as Dame Edna might say.

There are 35 million blogs in the world…and rising…at the rate of 75000 a day. I have eleven of them…perhaps even 97 depending on how they are counted. I have made 250 postings during the first half of this year…204 to this daily William Shepherd blog, 33 to Shepherd on Climate, seven to my Magna Carta II blog, five to my Market Trader blog, one to a Family Research blog…although this is a little misleading as the one posting contains a couple of dozen entries…and two others awaiting my attention…one on the History of Usury and the other one set up in support of the September 2006 Radical Consultation.

My blog hosts work out of Berlin and have sold me 100 blogspaces with 7% currently in use...which is why blogspots are on offer to Chinese Dissidents if they can get their material out of China…Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Problem. It was nice to get 100 blogs but removing adverts from my blogs was why I bought the package. I have a few other blogs dotted around…a couple at Rupert Murdoch's My Space and two with a Swedish Bloghost where 13% of the bloggers are in love, 18% are miserable, 10% are angry and a splendid 59% are happy with their lives.

Were I a typical member of the blogging fraternity you could divide that 35 million by ten and get 3.5 million bloggers in the world…or 350 000 of us worldwide. But I am not typical. Another approach would assume Pareto’s Law applies with 20% of the blogs getting 80% of the traffic. This would then suggest a hard core of five million Real Blogs and one million Real Bloggers…people like China’s Hao Wu of Beijing or Bust, America’s Rebecca MacKinnon of Harvard’s Global Voices, Sweden’s Karolina Lassbo of Glamour Princess’ Diary and me.

Anything with millions attracts the attention of the PLM…the Politico-Legal-Media Complex…and in particular the advertising end of M. The advertisers’ first question is always if their money is well-spent. They know that half of it is wasted but do not know which half. Television Media Companies get paid by the number of eye-pairs they deliver to the advertiser…viewers with Face Furniture count double. But are they looking and will they buy?

To the embarrassment of the advertising industry the answer to the second question appears to be no. A film maker recently placed a camera on top of a few dozen television sets…facing the sofas…and edited the raw footage they produced into a documentary film. People with the family television on do not actually watch it. In fact they will do almost anything to avoid watching it. Whoops. And we thought they just went to the kitchen to make tea at half-time.

For each Tuned In, Turned Off and Shopped Out question there are sub-questions like who is watching and who is spending whose money. But do Watchers Buy? The answer is sought in anecdote and statistics. With anecdote the game is to find a success story and ignore the fact that every success breeds a thousand failures.

And Direct Mail is an example of statistics. It’s a percentage game. Send out a million pieces of junk, get a few hundred responses with a few hundred percent mark up on the crap you bought at a distress sale…plus some other tricks you can pull…pay your expenses and you turn a profit. If not take a loss and offset it against taxes. In the worst case file for company bankruptcy…before paying expenses…except up front ones. Ain’t Capitalism wonderful?

The advertising business runs on Hype ‘n Hope…the old Wing & A Prayer formula. The next Great Hope Hype are the Bloggers…and one of them comes in pink. Karolina Lassbo is doing her Law Finals at Uppsala University. But between classes she is a Design Guru for the Pretty in Pink teenage set. Her blogsite gets 30000 visitors a week.

Karolina’s global audience is thirty times the size of mine. My blogscore is 2500 page views this year on this blog and 750 on the Climate and the Franklin blogs with on average 2-page views per visitor…me and search engines among them. Glamour Princess’ Diary runs a few campaigns which are typically short-lived but lucrative…bringing in a few kronor per click. But most of her income comes from Tradedoubler…a European webcommerce provider similar to the US-based MeCommerce from Goodstorm…motto Capitalism Done Right...that eBay has her eyes on.

These webfirms provide bloggers with a list of advertisers to choose from, tracks their trading and pays a percentage of retail on each online trade…50% in the case of MeCommerce. The idea of visitors buying stuff from a blogger they trust and want to support is nice. I had plans to back up my recent remark that ‘my Drinking Policy is not to until the sun goes beneath the yardarm’ by doing the rounds of the neighbourhood alcohol division…the pub…of our friendly global drug pushers and offering to shift to mid-afternoon…or repeat myself in mid-winter…for a slice of the action and a shilling in the pound to Leopold Kohr’s Academic Inn. But it makes more sense to sell from the ‘vast catalogue of books, DVD's, CD's, and video games’ at MeCommerce…were it not for one little cloud on the horizon.

Annica is a friend of Karolina. Her blog tells me…and a few thousand others in the blogosphere…that she was moving her blog to her own domain ‘to get rid of that pesky blogspot ad’. Hmm! Annica recommends you listen to Qu'est Ce Que J'ai Fait by Tony Head and read Blood on the Moon by James Ellroy. Why not buy them through me?

In the days before Ronald Reagan, Academics developed concepts like Domino Theory to justify the use of force in faraway places like South-East Asia. Most of the ideas were variations on the theme of defending the world against The Communist Menace. But the Reagan People improved on the rhetoric with the notion of an Evil Empire to describe the Soviet Union…and the idea of a Terrorist State.

But it was Bill Clinton’s speechwriters who first coined the phrase Rogue State…with Failed States coming later. Rogue States…like Iraq…threatened US Security while Failed States…like Haiti…required US Intervention to save them. Shame about the Mess that got left behind.

Most Americans manage to overlook the fact that under US Law their country fits the category of Terrorist and Rogue State better than most. In American academic circles it has long been accepted that the rest of the world regards the USA as the leading rogue state and a threat to their existence. Foreign Affairs Specialists write it as a fact.

But Noam Chomsky is now going round the studios telling Americans that they are also one of the best Failed States as well…and suggesting there might be a connection between the two facts. On this the American People do not need much persuading. The overwhelming majority of Americans take the view that their country has a Democratic Deficit…a gap between public policy and public opinion…although being well to the right of the People, the political parties are unwilling to accept this. And Democratic Deficiency is a key measure of the Failed State.

This brings me to Sweden. Not too big. Not too small. Just the right size…but bottom of the Rogue State and Failed State leagues…alongside New Zealand and Switzerland. To be Small or Not To Be Democratic At All? If State Research were conducted along similar lines to Medical Research millions of research dollars would have poured into statistical analyses of these league tables. Particular attention would have been directed to states that altered their size and shape by acquisition or dismemberment. The statistical findings would have been incontrovertible. Size matters…and a population of a few million is great news for the State’s inhabitants...and the neighbouring states too.

Then our State Researchers would have moved on to Confederations and…the coming thing…Diasporas. Business Researchers have discovered by studying the data that Financial Portfolios suffer from Diminishing Returns and the more items they include the worse they get. The Optimum Portfolio Size is six to ten…which might be true of confederations too.

If I lived in Vermont I would like to know if it were better for my family to live in a Province of a Large Failed Rogue State or as part of a Confederation of Successful Small States at the foot of the Rogue State League. It is good to see this question is now on Vermont’s Agenda. One day we may be grateful for the Academics who invented the concepts of Rogue and Failed States. So much research to do…so little being done. To conclude here are two extracts from Speculation Past in The Rise & Fall of the Swedish Green Party (1982-1997).

After allowing the Norwegians to secede peacefully and create a new country on their Atlantic Seaboard at the beginning of the century, the remaining eight million Swedes continued their virtuoso display of war avoidance diplomacy - a skill acquired during the early years of the 19th century when Napoleon’s troops were establishing military bases along the estuaries of the rivers running out of Central Europe into the Baltic Lakes.

By the time the governments of the European Colonizing Companies embarked upon The Great Folly of employing their young men as cannon fodder in 1914 Little Sweden was well rehearsed in the Art of Non-Alignment. It knew all there was to know about weaving and bobbing and keeping your head down, and had learned how to avoid slaughtering its youngest, strongest, best and brightest men. It had become a small sensible Nation-State that remembered its imperial pretensions of bygone days and understood that nothing awaits warring empires...be they hailed as Victors of the War or Winners of the Peace…except their exhaustion, their division and their subsequent brief but glorious Golden Age…echoes of Leopold Kohr in The Philosophies of Misery…perchance even Plagiarism.