[Cross-posted] Sometimes I surprise myself on what comes up in blog comments. In a thread about the Iraq war and the short memories of nations over on Vox, I wrote the following. And as I wrote, I believed this to be a possible truth.

To go forth in the future we need to discover our past, a hard thing in an age of short memories as you say. … Leadership might not come from size but from those nations that have steadfastly refused to give in to the prevailing decline in so many places. Switzerland, for all its refusal to join the EU, has managed to maintain one of the greatest gun ownership rates in the world yet not have a single gun-related murder attributable to its own in most years; Singapore, retaining its Confucian philosophies, manages a city-state with limited natural resources.
   Their example needs to be communicated to the world, as well as the positive aspects of certain parts of the US or China—they exist, but they are hidden.
   This is one reason to like blogs because they can cut through the shield of the MSM and government propaganda. I do not think that we have reached any critical mass among netizens, networking citizens together in a form of moral leadership. … [T]here are pockets of good people everywhere as you and I have witnessed, just that we are not necessarily visible.
   But that critical mass can come—and if warfare now is at a terrorist, guerrilla level in so many places, I suspect moral leadership itself will come from a grass-roots base.
   The system needs idealists like us, reminding people of their short memories, and maybe change will be effected not through top–down governmental, propagandist methods or the MSM, but through one-on-few communications from each of us.
   I would rather hope that the next superpower, therefore, is not a nation or even an ideology, but a collective of humankind cutting through the BS and revealing the truth. Who says the ’net cannot be a force for good once more? If it can propagate hate and porn, it can just as easily propagate hope and truth.

   I get reminded of this every now and then by others who feel the same way: Chris, at the Edutainment & Convergence blog, wrote to me privately and inspired me. And when I think back to books like Beyond Branding and Typography & Branding, I think there was a great deal of post-9-11 optimism and the desire to build a better, more understanding world. I find passages of my Typography & Branding inspiring, if an author is allowed to be inspired by his own work, and I can’t have been this cynical back then.
   It’s a good zone to be in and I haven’t felt this hopeful about the potential of the ’net in about a year.
   Last year, I was bemoaning the decline of the blogosphere as it began looking more and more like the darker parts of society, with gossipmongers and rude, anonymous commenters finding their way on to it. Where were, I asked, the globally minded idealists of the 1990s?
   On the other hand, their entry into this world surely puts them closer to the hands of the idealists who can now shape agenda, creating more hopeful sites and messages.
   And maybe channelling or finding the above message from my subconscious helped me put things into perspective more. If indeed the state nation is less relevant and change is better effected by people helping people directly, because technology has now made that possible, then the moral vacuum caused by various changes in society can be filled.
   All it needs are willing participants prepared to get together to make the world a better place, regardless of their political, cultural or religious stripes.
   That’s really why I got into media.
   If we agree on this target, then the rest must follow.

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Why is it that when I watch Alias in New Zealand on TV2, Jennifer Garner and the rest of the cast are really, really fat?
   I am serious. The programme airs with the wrong proportions for the TV screen almost every week, for between, say, 10 seconds to the first 10 minutes. Everything is stretched so wide it’s basically unwatchable. It’s like the computers stretch everything at TVNZ and then someone figures out that some button hasn’t been pressed and shrink Garner, Garber and everyone back to size after the ad break.
   I’m not an Alias fan but still, this isn’t good enough.

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I have been reading about Terri Schiavo again after learning of two new cases on the Jus Me Again blog.
   I was against the removal of Terri’s feeding tube. I’ll come right out and say that now. However, I did not believe Michael Schiavo should have been vilified the way he was by some people. I believe he did what he thought to be right and what he thought Terri had wanted. I do feel he might have been swayed by the medical “establishment”.
   Among my reasons is that medical science cannot give us any determination about a person’s spirit, although I know this inquiry is irrelevant to those in the field. Another major reason is not against medical science itself but against some who apply it. Healthcare is too often founded on monetary considerations, not about right and wrong.
   Before the technology that kept Terri alive had been invented, wouldn’t many families have prayed that they had something like that?
   And now that we do have defibrillators and more modern scientific technologies, we are ignoring them and saying, ‘Let them die,’ and getting courts to divorce themselves from the spiritual element.
   After Terri’s feeding tube was removed, she took another 13 days to join the Lord. That doesn’t sound a lot like someone who had just given up the fight and was ready to be outta here. And before I get criticized, I do know what it’s like to look after someone you love who is battling something that medical science regards is terminal.
   There are too many cases in my family where western medicine had given up on someone, but eastern medicine and prayer had not.
   The latter usually win.
   My grandfather’s advanced liver cancer was cured by praying and by quickly rushing him herbs from Hong Kong to drink as a tonic. The two weeks the “experts” gave him turned out to be 21 years.
   We hear of cases like this in my family regularly enough for me to place less faith in some of the medical judgements that are made.
   I accept that the cases I have confronted are different, but I believe my experience allows me to at least imagine what I would do more clearly.
   I commented today that having differently abled people in our lives shows whether we can be God-like:

There are a few ways to look at the disabled. The first is that they give us the opportunity to experience an element of Godliness. I purposely use the Father’s name here. He does not judge any of us and loves us all equally. Knowing people who society classes as ‘disabled’ or differently abled is a training ground for seeing if we can remove our prejudices and extend the same love to them. The second is to understand that on a spiritual plane they are equal to us. None of us can say that a disabled Christian is any less a Christian or has any less of the Holy Spirit running through him or her. This can be extended to other religions or to atheists as God views us all equally on that spiritual level.

   If we forget first principles and judge things on money, then we have already taken the wrong direction.
   Twenty-three-year-old Lauren Richardson in Delaware is facing a Terri-like situation. While the reason Miss Richardson lies in hospital is clearer—she had a heroin overdose—I am not here to judge her lifestyle.
   Her mother, Edith Towers, thinks that her daughter wouldn’t want to live this way and managed to get a court order, while her father, Randy Richardson, is fighting it.
   Ms Towers says that her daughter told her that she did not want to live like Terri Schiavo if she found herself in the same situation. Again, we cannot blame her for trying to carry out what she believes are her wishes. And we would again be wrong to vilify her as many did with Michael Schiavo.
   While in her “vegetative” state, Lauren Richardson gave birth to a healthy baby girl last February.
   I do not think it is right for Ms Towers to prevent her daughter from seeing her own child, which is what the press has reported. You never know what reaction a mother might have to her own child. Lauren Richardson needs to be given at least this simple chance.
   A pro-life video shows that Lauren seems to react to family members and her dog.
   Meanwhile, a Manitoba case involving an 84-year-old man who suffered brain damage is also being fought.
   Samuel Golubchuk suffered a brain injury after a 2003 fall. He contracted pneumonia in October. The medical staff want to dehydrate him to end his life.
   Mr Golubchuk is an Orthodox Jew and does not believe that his death should be hastened, so there is no doubt about what he wants.
   In January, he regained consciousness and his doctor recorded ‘Awake’ on his chart.
   The Manitoba College of Physicians and Surgeons has guidelines that say it’s not up to the patient or the family, but the doctor, so apparently we can forget Mr Golubchuk’s views and the fact that he is awake and alive.
   This Canadian case is ridiculous, in my view, and it seems that Canada is perfectly willing to introduce euthanasia. Germany started off with euthanasing the disabled in the 1930s. It grew from there.
   Please blog about this if you want to help either Miss Richardson or Mr Golubchuk. There’s no way in heck I’d let some doctors kill me off if I were in their shoes. And for the record, while my father has said it would be horrible for someone to be a vegetable, he is as spiritual as I am on these issues.

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Which are your favourite sites for shopping online?

One word: Amazon. Since 1996 I have been happily shopping there and the way the website checkout is structured has become a de facto shopping model.

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These are some photos from Taiwan, some taken for a friend to whom I promised I would send oddball pics. Let’s begin:

Jiji freak show

Taichung at night

Kiss my ass furniture store

Giant wiener guarding display

Love jade uncle

Top of 101 from outside deck 1

KMT soldier

Computer markets in Taipei 2

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[Cross-posted] Honda’s Takeo Fukui has said that he will put the world’s first hydrogen fuel-cell car on the market by next year, with a sticker price of around £50,000. The car emits water vapour as its “exhaust”.
   This is fabulous thinking: rather than hold the technology back, as all the other automakers are doing, Honda is going full steam ahead and pioneering.
   In one move, it’s overcome any slowdown in the Japanese car market and made an impact in an eco-conscious world.
   And £50,000 isn’t a lot to pay for a large sedan that’s brimming with technological advancements.
   Asked how the new Honda FCX might overcome the absence of hydrogen filling stations, Mr Fukui gave a great answer that shows the company has really considered its car in a historical context: ‘When the car was invented, countries weren’t full of petrol stations. When the demand is there it will happen.’
   It makes Red China’s copying of western automotive models seem outmoded and silly, considering that it had nearly a carte blanche with which to play in the 1980s and 1990s. That could have meant jumping ahead of the rest of the world without having the worries of old plant costs to contend with.
   It also shows that brands will only get you so far: major leaps ahead like this, without reference to what the establishment might think, can spell success when it taps in to the Zeitgeist. And Honda has detected that the world in the late-2000s is still going to be obsessed with global warming and climate change. It has detected that there is a rebellion against brands that do not help the planet. And it might have also considered that there will be a rationalization in the brands we deal with, so why not get ahead now?

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I found an excellent New Zealand blog today: En Avant, by Jim Donovan. I like the quality of what the guy is discussing, plus he’s in Wellington, which is a huge surprise, since I thought I frequented all the great local blogs. I thought wrong. It’s a good commentary on business and tech. And as with most of you here on Vox, he has good, civilized commenters. (I get some weird ones elsewhere.)
   In his blogroll is ‘Peter Griffin’. I was slightly disappointed it was not a Family Guy tie-in. It’s a tech blogger working for APN’s The New Zealand Herald.

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