In a time of crisis when men/women of vision and ability need to quickly agree a strategy and execute it with confidence, Brian Cowen assembles 28 people (plus the heads of Enterprise Ireland, IDA Ireland, Science Foundation Ireland, the Higher Education Authority and representatives from the departments of Education and Science, Enterprise, Trade and Employment, and Finance).

Yes my jaw hit the floor too.

A 40+ person talk-shop and travel expenses generator. That’s what Cowen and Coughlan think this country needs?

Because it’s worked so well in the past? Does the word agile mean anything to these people?

40+ people and two of them are women?

What century is this?

When Sean Lemass and T.K. Whitaker dragged this country kicking and screaming out of a hellhole from 1959 onwards, did they spend months (or years) prattling on with anyone who had on opinion?

I actually have a pain in my stomach with anger over this. These are our leaders? I’m not talking about C&C, I mean the committee. Did anyone who was asked say “NO, get a clue”? Did anyone who was asked question the utter stupidity of assembling this joke? Did anyone who was asked, reply “ENOUGH TALKING”.

Is there any senior person in the Irish Civil Service or Quango-sector who is tearing their hair out this morning and screaming in frustration too?

Yes? Then maybe it’s time for an alternative.

We need (possibly anonymously):

• 1 Senior Civil Servant, non-EI
• 1 Senior Civil Servant, EI
• 1 head of an FDI company with a large Irish operation in non-manufacture
• 1 head of a globally successful indigenous company
• 1 head of a startup
• 1 politician with a business or financial background

2 months. 3 max.

Outcome – a disruptive plan to rebuild the Irish economy and the business environment in a sustainable way around the idea of Constructive Capitalism. And a marketing plan to go with it. If our leaders won’t lead then it’s time to subvert from the bottom-up.

This type of thinking:

Umair Haque @ Daytona Sessions vol. 2 – Constructive Capitalism from Daytona Sessions on Vimeo.

and this:

Anyone? Anyone?

conor AT loudervoice DOT com

Now you can be informed.

What John Handelaar has done over at kildarestreet.com with the help of some other great people is deeply important. Quite simply, the Dáil record is now properly accessible rather than just available. The site enables you to do the following:

• Read a dramatically-more-legible version of the Dáil Record going back to January 2004
• Search that record by speeches or written questions, or by speaker, or by date or date range
• Sign up for email alerts for when a search query you’re interested changes
• Sign up for email alerts whenever a TD of your choosing says something or asks a question which generated a written reply
• Subscribe to RSS feeds for individual TDs or for search queries

This isn’t just important for the content you find but also for the content that you don’t find. I will not be voting for any sitting TD in any future election unless I see continuous active engagement by them in the Dáil. If they don’t have anything to say, they shouldn’t be there.

The days of some gobshite getting elected because he got your daughter a job in the Civil Service or claims to be responsible for every penny spent in your constituency have to come to an end. kildarestreet.com will hopefully help usher the beginning of proper national politics involving those who care about our country and what it can become.

We all sat idly by as those running this country ran it into the ground. It’s time we started paying attention.

UPDATE:

I just used the site to check on our three TDs in Cork South-West. Summary as follows for the past year:

• Christy O’Sullivan (FF): Has spoken in 5 debates in the last year — well below average among TDs. Has received answers to 8 written questions in the last year — below average among TDs
• PJ Sheehan (FG): Has spoken in 81 debates in the last year — above average among TDs. Has received answers to 101 written questions in the last year — average among TDs.
• Jim O’Keeffe (FG): Has spoken in 51 debates in the last year — average among TDs. Has received answers to 173 written questions in the last year — above average among TDs.

After seeing this, I take back any ageist comments I made in the last election about PJ Sheehan and I’m disappointed to see my predictions about Christy O’Sullivan have proven true.

I don’t claim to know much about investing but when we were moving from Dublin to Cork in 2003 and saw that our house had increased in value more than 400% in 9 years, we took the money and ran. Even in 2003 the valuations seemed idiotic. By 2007 they were in the realms of fantasy land. Of course many people told us we were stupid and if we’d rented the house out in Dublin we’d have made another €200k minimum when we went to sell. But when would we have sold? 2005? 2006? Or, gawd ‘elp us, 2008? Did I mention we sold our Eircom shares after 2 weeks? Maybe we do know what we are doing!

Then today I listened to this podcast of Peter Schiff speaking at the 2009 Austrian Scholar’s Conference. It’s long but utterly riveting. You think the worst is over? You think G20 is going to sort it all out? Listen to this and be afraid, be very afraid.

Here is the original RTE piece on the Cowen nudes that they removed from their site and then apologised for mentioning. Thanks to Mr Mulley.

“Against us are… all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty… We are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils..”

So the thought struck me this morning that a dictionary is the ideal target for a community effort, like Wikipedia is for encyclopedias. In fact, some sort of custom wiki might be ideal as a base for generating such a dictionary.

It could start very simply with one page per letter of the alphabet and as it grows, new pages are generated to sub-divide it. A wiki is very simply a web-site with pages that anyone can edit. The idea being that if you went to the wiki-dictionary to find the translation of a word and you spotted other ones that were missing, in a few simple clicks you could add them.

Of course it would need an agreed style of entry so it looked consistent but I’m sure there are plenty of language experts who could come up with a few simple rules for that. It would also need moderators to keep it clean and delete spam etc. And the search function would have to be very good.

For the laugh, I’ve just created a sample of what that might look like over at pbWiki. It took all of ten minutes to do and is called focloir.pbwiki.com. When Google makes JotSpot free, that might be the ideal location for such a resource since Jotspot is much easier to use than most wikis.

So what do people think? A bit too techie? A bit too idealistic? No need?

Technorati Tags: foclóir, dictionary, wiki, Irish, Gaeilge, community, UGC, jotspot

If I want to buy fat-laden, carb-laden, salt-laden Tayto, I bloody will and they chances of me looking at some insulting graphics are zero. When I smoked, you could have put pictures of sliced open cancerous lungs on the box and I’d happily have puffed away.

Information is only useful to those seeking it. If we want nutrition information then we’ll use the amazing human ability to read to find out what is in the box. “oh but people don’t know what a safe level of salt is, so our traffic light system will enable them to figure this out without actually ever having to think”. “Next year, we’ll be bringing in a system which does an instant analysis of your blood and won’t let you buy anything with too much salt or sugar”.

I was pleasantly surprised that FF told the opposition to get a clue and that they would not be bringing in such a scheme.

The first political party which starts a campaign to destroy the ever growing nanny state gets my vote.

You want people to eat properly? Then make Home Economics, Social & Scientific, Cooking compulsory in schools for both boys and girls starting around age 7. Hell, you could do a double whammy and teach it through Irish.

Technorati Tags: Traffic+Lights, Food, Labour, Fine+Gael, Marxism, Nanny+State, Nutrition, Intelligence, Cop+On, Information, Knowledge, Cooking, Tayto

Oh but they did arrest over 100 drunk drivers today. Keep that up for 365 days a year and maybe it’ll be something other than a reflection of their day-to-day incompetence as they waste taxpayers money snaring people doing 45 in 40 zones on bypasses across the country.

Technorati Tags: roadsafetyblog, efficiency, resources, resource+managment, competence, quotas, lip+service

Technorati Tags: Kids, High Heels, Jimmy Choos

On the upside, I’d happily pay €5 an hour to have a PSP embedded in the seat back in front of me. But will he really do that?

Technorati Tags: RyanAir, Aer+Lingus

Related to this, I noticed something very interesting on the BBC web-site over the past few days when checking up on him. All of the headlines are obviously decided by editors and news experts and reflect what they think are the pressing issues of the day e.g. various Iranian or Venezuelan numbskulls embarassing their nations at the UN or the genuinely important Darfur and so on. Nowhere in the headlines, after the first announcement, has Hammond been mentioned.

But if you scrolled down to the section on “most read” or “most emailed”, it is stories about Hammond that have been number one for the past three days! It really highlights the huge difference between what we “should” be interested in and what we actually are interested in.

Those of you familiar with Digg know that it is a news site where the top stories are dictated by how many votes they get from the users. They are sometimes accused by “our betters” as pandering to the mob mentality and you often do get nonsense stories as the top ones of the day but what I have always found interesting about Digg is that it generally is a strong reflection of the important stories of the day as agreed on mainstream tech news sites too. So the mob mentality works a lot of the time. I guess it is a variation of the theme of that book “The Wisdom of Crowds“(which I really should read).

Whilst I’m not saying the BBC should dump their editors (well actually they should fire all the ones who insist on the use of inverted commas around any phrase that might be considered controversial: “terrorist”, “mass murderer”, “totalitarian dictator”, “king”), they might consider making one of the headline boxes a display for the most popular story over a 4/8/12/24 hour period. News for the people by the people.

I guess that is why I am such a fan of blogs and RSS feeds – I can subscribe to sites that feed me information that I am interested in and by taking a reasonable cross-section, I end up with a fairly rich view of certain topics and stories.

My issue with general news sites (not just the BBC) is that I don’t have the tools yet to filter the torrent of stories they push out and I can neither keep up with nor have interest in 90% of that information. A news feed which monitors my reading and filters based on what I have read historically would be a very powerful tool indeed.

Technorati Tags: Richard+Hammond, BBC, News, Digg, Mob+Mentality, Wisdom+Crowds

As a test I put in the phrase “famine Ireland” and then selected “before 1880″ and found a newspaper article from The Republican Compiler of Gettysburg on March 1st 1847 which mentions the suffering caused by the Irish famine.

This is an incredibly powerful tool for anyone interested in what was really going on at a particular time rather than the interpretation put on things by historians.

As a tool for schoolkids, it really does boggle the mind compared to what I grew up with. I remember our Irish history book in the Inter Cert doing 1922 to 1969 in a couple of pages and then stopping at 1969.

Imagine if the Irish Times, The Indo and whoever owns the rights to The Irish Press were to hand over their archives to Google Ireland? Hell, I’d be happy to see my tax euros spent on paying them to do it.

Next query, “bombing of Dresden”. Dunno why but it was the first thing that popped into my head after the famine. Oh I’m a barrel of laughs today.

tags: Google, News+Archive+Search, The+Irish+Press, The+Irish+Times, The+Irish+Independent