The victims of these injustices are not only women, but all. A world that is unjust for some, it is actually unjust for most of us except the minority that takes advantages of the injustice. Thus, all of us should be activists in removing from our planet the stigma of being a woman.

I’d like to quote a sentence that I read today on Francisco Polo’s blog:

To be a girl is so powerful that we had to educate everyone not to be one.

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Clouds is what I see
storms is what I bring
beasts is what I create
it ain’t what I wish…ed

Walking on dark tiles
dragging waves in dreams
sinking in me
drowning what remains

Closed eyes
still body
senseless soul
end is here

telling me to go

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Why does art give us pleasure? Or at least, why does it give it to some?

Imagine yourself in front of this Kandinsky painting. For some, this might be an ugly doodle. But for many it is a very appealing piece of art. Why? I think it is in part because of learning. When we look at this painting our brains start to imagine and construct its meaning, they try to find links between its different elements (e.g. shapes, colours, positions, structure, textures…). These links can be old (learned) or new. While watching we learn the new ones as part of the “possible world”, thus new neuronal connections are created linking “things” never linked before. We are learning. This creates a mental pleasure, that in fact, represents the actual building of physical connections between our neurons.

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After spending a couple of days in DC, the Amtrak train brought to Penn Station on Wednesday afternoon to attend this conference. Today, the panels were particularly good. Tomorrow, it promises to be as good or even better.

On Saturday, I am attending another conference in Columbia University about policy-making in the digital era. In both conferences, Jonathan Zittrain speaks. It seems that there are only a couple of people that talk about these things in a country of 300 million people. Funny.

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The New York Times, still the best newspaper in the world IMHO, has a news article on how Goldman Sachs and other Wall St banks negotiated financial products with the Greek government, and possibly other European countries, which facilitated their hiding of high deficits to get onto the Euro. In return, they got the future proceeds of Greece’s airports and highways, among other things in a deal termed as a “garage sale”.

This is what happens when governments and public administrations do what their please without the proper scrutiny. In most of Europe, parliaments are not anymore, if they ever where, a place of accountability, but of consent and quarrelling. Today, it is up to the citizen to control that those who govern us and administer our resources and tax money do it properly. Every bit of control, even the minor one is useful by aggregation. For this we need new instruments and rules. Opening public data to all (e.g. data.gov and data.gov.uk) is a very good step in this direction.

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In itself this fact is worrisome. At the request of a government Facebook decides, at its own judgment, to curtail the individual freedom of 30 people (for though they are in prison and they are crime offenders, they are still people), without the intervention of a judge to guarantee the respect of fundamental rights. It seems that victims, government and Facebook (!) are the new authorities with regards to online freedom.

But it gets worse, for these new authorities are taking their self-assigned responsibilities very seriously, according to their declarations reported on today’s International Herald Tribune (print-version).

Gary Trodwell of Families United, a group founded by relatives of young murder victims, said:

When someone is convicted of a crime he loses his civil liberty through sentencing…We say he should lose his cyberliberty as well.”

Will Mr. Trodwell run for Parliament to get that law passed?

Even worse, John Straw commenting on the excessive time that took Facebook to take off the pages (48 hours!), he said:

What we’ve got to do is set up a better system with Facebook so that if they get a notice from us that this site is improper the all tehy have to do is not make a judgment about it but press the delete button”

What about given the same powers to China or Iran, Mr. Straw?

Even, even worse, Facebook wants to become the online sheriff, or at least that’s what Sophie Silver, a Facebook spokeswoman, is implying when she affirms that:

Facebook is absolutely committed to keeping its sites safe and clean…[the web could] be a wild an unruly place. Facebook tries to put some rules and protocols on top of the unruly Web.”

Wow, good thing we have Facebook, don’t you think? Otherwise we’ll be all online raped and smuggled by the scary people populating the “wild and unruly” online world!

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Later, I went to the Regent Street Apple Store to return the 15 inch Macbook Pro I bought after my 2006 Macbook’s logic board melted, which I replaced with less difficulty and cheaper than I thought. Then, I went to John Lewis to buy two new beds for the London flat – I should have them next week, my back is looking forward to it.

Now, I am @ The Hub in King’s Cross. The video on c’llr 10 for TweetyHall is finished, and a bit later I am having a conversation about a tech & democracy in Catalunya with some people in Barcelona. It looks promising.

So much to do in London, so little time…

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