Change of place

I have left the UK and for the time being I am residing in Taos, New Mexico. This is a temporary state, but all states are.

The altitude is about 7000 feet and the humidity is low. I've spent the first 2 days acclimatising to the thin air and the drying effects of the desert: my lips are drying and cracking.

Taos had a lot of snow on Sunday and the street on which I'm staying is still covered with compacted snow. I walk slowly and deliberately. But the air is clear and clean and the light at this elevation is spectacular. The sunset leaves vivid colours on the mountains and it reminds me of the skies in Australia.

What would you do for £100?

In these economically pressed times, what would you do for $202? 

Wal-Mart seems to be the epicentre of this herd mentality, that left one employee trampled to death. At another Wal-mart in Columbus, Ohio, Ms Nikki Nicely -- aged 19 -- was prepared to give and receive physical violence.

According to the The New York Times, Ms Nicely: "...jumped onto a man’s back and pounded his shoulders when he tried to take a 40-inch Samsung flat-screen television to which she had laid claim. “That’s my TV!” Ms. Nicely shouted. “That’s my TV!” A police officer and security guard intervened, but not before Ms. Nicely took an elbow in the face. In the end, she was the one with the $798 television, marked down from $1,000. “That’s right,” she cried as her adversary walked away. “This here is my TV!”"

What is our life for? What is it worth? 

About £100, it seems. 

Denying Reality: Financial Markets on the edge

It's not healthy to deny what is happening around you. Reality is more than just perception, it is what happens while you ignore it until some event forces you to reconsider that perception.

However, the financial markets are built on perception and that has given us the boom in property prices here in the UK and in the US, plus the dramatic "credit crunch" we are now experiencing. Northern Rock was the prelude, a little taster of what was to come. The real performance started this year on Wall Street: the collapse of Bear Sterns with its rescue with public money, the nationalisation ("Conservatorship") of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and now the imminent collapse of Lehman Brothers bank and perhaps the buyout of Merril Lynch.

All these institutions got in to their current predicaments by short term thinking, using massive bonus to reward investments with no long term viability. This was fuelled by irrational group psychology of the trading floors, which in turn is fuelled by testosterone. This clouds the perceptions of not only the dealers but the executives who control the organisations. As one investor has commented "Lehman tried to deny reality until the bitter end."

"Competition and growth" are the bywords of free market capitalism, not "co-operation and sustainability." Competition is a masculine mindset, the same testosterone fuelled psychology that bought us the zero-sum game.

Will it change? That depends on how cynical you are. Hope is normally lumped together with Idealism by those who prefer the status quo. But if the credit crunch tells us one thing, it is that if you live by the market; you die by the market.

When all we had was our labour-power to sell, we banded together to form labour unions. They worked so well that by the 1970s they were too powerful for the ruling elites. The pendulum has now swung back towards the property owners. Capital, the financial markets are all powerful and it seems there is no way we can change things. But we can: We own the means of consumption.

We can choose to borrow. We can choose what to spend our money on. We can even save it. If this financial crisis proves anything, it proves we can take control of the financial markets by withholding our participation within them. By choosing how and where we spend our money, we can starve the markets of what they need: financially ignorant players from whom they can fuel their cancer-like growth.

Change is in our hands. What will we do with it?

Pentagon envisioning a costly Internet for war

Pentagon envisioning a costly Internet for war | CNET News.com: That is the vision of the new web: war machines with a common language for all military forces, instantly emitting encyclopedias of lethal information against all enemies.