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Dublin, Friday 13th of June, 2008

The problem is not that there are too many elections for Europe, but too few. And the people feel they are not controlling a process that is bigger than them.
When people vote No at the battlecry: when in doubt vote No, how else would You interprete it?

Now, it can be that the United States have given a help, under the table, to finance the advertisments against the treaty. After all they have all to gain from being the only superpower. But the advertisments found a fertile land to sprout.

When 95% of the irish parliament said to vote Yes, and the clear majority of people voted for No… something must mean.

Calderoli for one time (the only!) is right in noticing how from when Europe had to ratify its constitution have lost every time.

Now, here, they want to call again for a second referendum, and again, and again, until the Yes wins. Strange that the constitution permits it.

I am not against voting again, but I think it should be done right.

When there is a referendum, and the result expressed is more than 20% different from what the parliament has suggested, it is obvious that the parliament is no more reppresentative of the people. And so it should be considered automatically delegitimised. New elections should be called immediatly, to renew the parliament. And after this a new referendum should be called. Referendum at which the new parliament should give indications of vote. And again if the results are more than 20% different, we should vote again, and so on. Until the fracture between the people and its representatives has been healed.

This would mean that the power truly belongs to the people, and the parliamentaries truly represent the people.

With the new technologies we could have one new election every other day, and a new referendum in between. Within one week we would have a new parliament, and a result of the referendum, that agree with each other.

BBC news missing Main European languages

The BBC is present in 43 languages. Incredible I would say. What is more incredible are the naguages that are missing, more than the languages that are present. In particular for Europe we have:
Russian, Uckrainian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Slovene, Slovak, Albanian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Greek, and Turkish.

Impressive, isn’t it? And yet don’t you feel that we are missing something? I mean… what about French, German, Spanish, and Italian? Well, French is there. Just not in the European list but in the African one. As well as Portuguese and Spanish (which is called Mundo just to make things more interesting, but the url recites ‘/spanish/’) for Latin America. But there is not just a difference of language but of focus. So, for example, there are two edition in Portugese: Portuguese (focused on South America) Portugueseafrica (focused on Africa).

Still French, German, Spanish, and Italian are missing as BBC pages focused on Europe, while German and Italian are just missing, fullstop (Japanese is also missing from the Asia languages, but I am sure it is a coincidence!).

The question remains, why is it so? And I suppose that from a strictly economical point of view it makes sense for BBC to invest in opening up to nations where they will not find a big competition with local media. Also the people who would
choose BBC in those countries are generally people from a highly educated background that surf often on the Internet. In short people who have little problems in reading their news in English.

Yet it would bve so good to have this other possible source of news for media-controlled-Italy. In the meantime Euronews offers news in 7 european languages. A message that it might seem a small niche for the BBC but the request for european news in Italian, German, Spanish, and French is there.

European Conference on Complex Systems

I just subscribed to the EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON COMPLEX SYSTEMS. I am grateful to Ricard Sole’ for pointing it out to me, and to Protolife for actually paying for my participation.