{taps on screen}

Heck, throw is some Standard Grade German a few sentences of something almost but not entirely unlike French and suddenly everyone goes all shy.

I read Asterix in French in high school. The bookstore on campus here has a ton of Asterix books in English.

Gerard Depardieu plays Obelix.

I must see this.

(Although I'll admit I find the idea of subsistence farming is actually rather appealing.)

colour me unsurprised that I'm now ear-wormed by the theme from The Good Life.

Hey Jimi, I was getting a little worried that we hadn't seen 'much' of you since you were sprung performing your impromptu strip-tease over on WX.

some would say they'd seen more than enough

I loved both Tintin and Asterix as a kid, although we had some books only in French, so I didn't know that The Blue Lotus was about the opium trade and World War II for many years. Alas that a lot of the Tintin books are unforgiveably racist. The only parts of Tintin in the Congo I cna bear to read are the parts where he comes across a rhino, can't figure out what to do with it, so he bores a hole in its back and tosses in some dynamite. Okay, that's juts my appreciation of inappropriate explodey humor.

My chief memory of Asterix? The giant Viking dog who talked with Dogmatix, who, to signify his Vikingness, barked like this: Wøøf! Wøøf! (Those are Os with slashes in them.)

Favorite names: English Gauls Selfemploymentax and Valueaddedtax, and most especially the Coriscan Boneywasawarriorwayayix. You know, I was probably 22 before I realized whom "Boney" refers to.

The UnAmerican thread is my most lurked thread. The handful of other threads I read I generally pop in and say something. I almost always read this thread and alternate between being educated and entertained. Thank you very much. Yet I rarely have anything to add to the discussion, and this is no exception to that rule.

ooer, I feel compelled to say something witty, or insightful.

However, since I've never done so in the past, I'm not about to start now.

Zoe, I'm in New York City.

For some reason, there was a minor Asterix cult in the science-fiction circles I moved in in the late eighties. I enjoyed it but not enough to seek out a lot more of it. You can get them in the larger comic book stores here in English translation. I looked at Tintin but he never did it for me--I don't really understand the appeal of it, looks like a less well-drawn version of the earlier Little Nemo in Slumberland, which I love.

Edit: Wow. I never knew people actually said "ooer"!

A couple of years ago I sprung for the deluxe collections of Little Nemo which have pretty appalling writing, but the most wonderful visuals ever. Seriously.

You're a brave woman. (Although I'll admit I find the idea of subsistence farming is actually rather appealing.)

Actually it's probably more foolish curiosity rather than bravery (the butter churning that is). I usually like to try things like that just to see how hard/time consuming they really are, that doesn't mean I wouldn't also be trying to figure out if I could attach a hand drill or power drill to the turning handle thingy to speed the process up.

And as to the subsistance farming, well it's more a desire for self-sufficiency which comes from a combination of wanting to 'work to live' not 'live to work', an increasing desire to be part of the solution to fixing the world's ills rather than continuing to contribute to making them worse, and as a consequence, a refusal to be part of the system that I see as exacerbating the problems.

As a first world female child of the 60's (born 1960) I grew up witnessing the launch of satellite transmitted television and telephone communication and was 8 years old when the whole school assembled in the hall to watch a man land and walk on the moon. I was a child in a home with a TV when millions of people all over the western world took to the streets to protest for equality, peace, and civil rights, and I was a teenager by the time that women's equality had moved from street protest and bra burning to the halls of the legislature. I remember when Australian 'abos' got the vote and Sth African sporting teams got boycotted, the fall of Sth African apartheid and the fall of Soviet communism. I listened with millions of others around the world to George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh, watched with many millions around the world Sir Bob Geldof's Feed the World concert (and the USA one too), have been proud to support Peter Gabriel's Witness program (and contribute to the three fortunes he has given away as part of his long association with Geldof and philanthropic stuff), and keenly follow the amazing work that Bono has been doing with the Drop the Debt program and African development. As a kid I watched the Thunderbirds and International Rescue, in the last few years I have watched real 'International Rescue Teams' involved in the aftermath of Turkish earthquakes, the Russian Kursk submarine disaster, Australian bush fires, African floods, and US WTC attack.

I remember when I was very young asking my father why there were millions of children/people starving and dying of diseases in so many other parts of the world and his answer was basically that even if we had all the will in the world, we didn't have the knowledge/expertise/technology/distribution/money to get the job done at that time, but that inroads were being made and that organisations such as the WHO were working specifically on stuff like that. OK I could live with that.

I grew up in a time that has seen a rearranging of work and leisure, of night and day, of winter and summer, a time in which millions of educated people in the western world, with no further use for magic or miracles, distanced themselves from the gods to whom they had been taught to pray when young.

Much of this self reliance came from scientific and technological achievements, in fact science itself was a new rational god hailed for decades as all-knowing, all-wise and capable of producing materialist miracles. Marxism for a time was a powerful alternative religion: Karl Marx preached that he was the first to find the scientific laws of human history and that those laws would ultimately produce a heaven, even though the heaven would be on earth. Whilst science and communism claimed to dispense with the gods, they almost enthroned the human race, and its potential, into a god. This utopian attitude, even more than traditional religion, is what has been in decline for the last part of the 20th century, with the collapse of communism in Russia and eastern Europe.

IOW where are all the world changing 'beyond 2000' things that we humans, as masters of our own destiny, said that we could deliver, the heaven on earth and the scientific miracles. As someone commented not long ago, "where's the Jetson's hovercraft thingy I was promised in the 21st century, I'm disappointed" (memfault). IMHO I don't think we're doing as well as we thought we would and I think that these vague feelings of disappointment are being felt by lots of people.

Technology has brought us all sorts of transport, all sorts of power sources, more advanced ways of seeing and hearing, computers, better teeth, genetic knowledge, and an enlarged collective memory, but none of these profound changes have altered the human will, human restlessness, the human desire for freedom or for conformity. So it can be said that many of the triumphs of science and technology were really only skin-deep (Stranglers anyone). IOW it is far easier in an era of mass production in the countryside and city, to satisfy the stomach than the mind, easier to tame diseases than to tame human behaviour.

In 1910 all the western physicists and chemists put together amounted to around 10,000 people. By the late 1980s the number of scientists, physicists, chemists and engineers etc. engaged in research and experimental development in the world was estimated at about 5 million. Wars proved the necessity of science and technology - bomb=proof.

After the moral issues raised by the war/bomb stuff abated we had a generation of science and technology that remained ideologically quiescent, enjoying the intellectual triumphs and the vastly expanded resources available. In the 1970's the US government funded 2/3 of the basic research costs in that country, which then ran at around 5 billion a year, and employed about 1 million scientists and engineers. The munificent patronage of governments and the military/industrial complex encouraged much scientific and tech research not to think too hard about the wider implications.

But from the 1970's environmental and social effects began to make it glaringly obvious that science, ie. the pursuit of truth, could not be separated from its conditions and consequences, and must be constrained and directed. At about the same time the global economic boom ended and as fuel and resources became more expensive, budgetary constraints had to also be applied. Thus ‘pure’ research (undefinite priorities and expensive) and ‘applied’ research (employed the most in the advance of knowledge) gave way to the need to achieve certain practical results. Researchers pursued what was socially useful or economically profitable, what was funded.

Two newspaper quotes to sum up the state of play by the 1990’s …

About their system,

Although the earthly ideal of Socialism-Communism has collapsed, the problems it purported to solve remain: the brazen use of social advantage and the inordinate power of money, which often direct the very course of events.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the New York Times (Nov 28 1993)

And about our system,

It remains, however, an imperfect force … About two thirds of the world’s population have gained little or no substantial advantage from rapid economic growth. In the developed world, the lowest quartile of income earners have witnessed trickle-up rather than trickle-down.

Editorial Financial Times (Dec 24 1993)

During the last few decades there have been some suggestions as to things that could be done to try to get a handle on all of this. One example is the Tobin Tax,

The tax could fund a huge increase in anti-poverty programmes. Aid to poor countries stands at around $55 billion per annum and it is falling. Basic education and health care, food security, water and sanitation could all be funded from the Tobin tax. It has been estimated that a tax of 0.1%, even after its calming effect, could raise between $50 and $300 billion a year. Even at the low end this would match existing levels of official aid.

So, almost 40 years later if I asked my father why there are still so many children/people dying of starvation and disease in so many other parts of the world, I think he would have to say that we now have the knowledge/expertise/technology/distribution/money to get the job done but we have don’t have the will. Sad really.