I'm starting to read through the 1800’s novel Heidi Johanna Spyri in the original German - a little bit each day - making it a vehicle for learning vocabulary.

One impression that strikes me immediately is that genders given to nouns may have been an academic flourish added to the language at some point in time... however, what the upshot is, is that it gives an allowance to writers and speakers to produce rather disjointed sentences. German sentences in literature seem to be a mess of many appended clauses. These would be considered "run-on sentences" in English. My idea, is that out in the rural areas, people got very excited about proving their intellect by knowing all the genders to the nouns... and then this rough rural language developed a very disjointed quality to it. Reading through these paragraphs makes me very happy that I speak English, where if you say "he" or "she," you know damn well it's a person which is being referred to.

I wonder further, if these genders of nouns act something like pegs or nails in a piece of wooden equipment... you can't take them out or the whole thing falls apart. I'm sure that certain progressively (and regressively) minded people sometimes want to change the gender of a noun. And I'm sure it happens from time to time... but it's a hard thing to do, because it would lead to lack of clarity. So, were genders a gambit by academics to keep an intentionally designed academic order within the language?

The broader musing would be: I wonder whether an organically evolving language like English evolves more sensibly than an academically designed language like German. Does it become quantitatively more useful and more elegant (more embellished with connotation, and synonym?)

Disclaimer (sigh... this has actually become longer than the paragraphs it refers to):

I know that my style of written personal musing can really rub a lot of people (especially folks in the USA) the wrong way. This distresses me - because I don't mean to sound arrogant. Believe it or not, humility is actually a very important value to me.

Like many of my personal meditations... this one charts out my models in a way that is obviously quite opinionated, and some would say is arrogant. I can honestly tell you that it's not meant to be. This little essay is an example of a fifteen-minute foray into the exploration of a set of models about how languages might evolve. When I'm doing that kind of mental excursion, I don't qualify my ideas on paper right away. To qualify your models, means that you've already developed your ideas to the point of maturity - and can now assent to some of the counterarguments, and possible weaknesses in your assessment. To be clear-thinking about an evolving model means that you have to be very earnest in respect to the current puzzle pieces you are putting together. Qualifying your ideas too soon can undermine that earnestness.

You may build your ideas about the world around you, differently. Maybe you synthesize pieces from what many different groups around you believe. However, I have found the method I describe to be the most effective way forward for me. It is a way of building my models separately from the mainstream preconceptions of the society in which I live.

This manner of model-building I describe, is part and parcel with why philosophical debate typically starts with "a proposition' - a novel assertion which reflects a strong conviction in the person who wants to bandy about this idea with the other folks. That starting point allows an idea to be easily weighed in the balances and tested. All the cards are on the table from the outset, for everyone to see.

In regards to the above blurb about the German language - the qualifications that brushed on my mind, but which I didn't commit to paper when I originally wrote it, are:

1. that naturally, it would not have been only academics who decided that the language ought to have genders - but it would have been a long historic tradition in the culture, which would have itself evolved organically out of perhaps a playful way of looking at the world.

2. that the "rough language" of groups of people who bear some stigma in a society is always the most innovative branch of the language. This is true with the northern parts of England. It's also true with rural people (who probably are also the ones who have more time to write novels and poetry and essays).

3. that each language has its own beauty. Genders, of course, add a lot of poetic nuance to people's discussions and meditations.

I haven't written on this blog for awhile. Instead, I've been participating in discussions over at this crazy website called "Reddit." Looking at my logs, I realize I'm not getting any visitors besides bots and the occasional spammer. Publishing for a readership of zero people seems to make little sense. However, I have noticed that I've gotten a few important life opportunities for myself, because the blog acts as kind of a résumé - it shows who I am to people whom I've just met.

A lot has happened in my life in the past six months. I was in Florida visiting my sister for Christmas. Then, I went to Hawaii in February.

In Hawaii, I spent a couple weeks with my brother, nephew, and extended family at Kauai resorts in Poipu and Hanalei - and then took off on my bicycle touring the islands. I spent a week more on each of four island - Kauai, the Big Island, Maui, and Oahu. It was a really intimate way to see the islands. I certainly saw a very different Hawaii than the tourist brochures advertise. It was good that way to be able to see the social systems and attitudes of real people. It's interesting that I saw it as being kind of an opposite place to Canada (which I visited in the summer of 2010). In Canada, everything looks like the USA on the surface - but underneath, people are powered by entirely different attitudes and approaches to life; in that way, I imagined Canada to be kind of like the sci-fi concept of a parallel world. In Hawaii, things seem very different on the surface, culturally - however, underneath, it's all Americana. It's even more American than the mainland in some ways. There's so much social drama there. It's fascinating.

People go to Hawaii with this quintessential American ideal in mind of "living for the weekend." They go there to relax and take it easy and enjoy life in that way. However, without a work ethic, their houses all become terribly dilapidated. I've never seen a place in the USA where most every property is just so run down. I see, further, that this environment they've created for themselves becomes a thing which confuses these people - and they start really resenting rich tourists who come through - developing a class struggle mentality. In reality, they could all be living in beautiful houses, if they would have the northern-European work ethic where people putter around their house every day in their free time, fixing things, cleaning things, painting things, etcetera. Those activities don't take any money, to speak of. It's my first taste of something I think they call "tall-poppy syndrome" further across the ocean, in Australia. From what I've heard, there's a similar social zeitgeist in places like Central America... or warm places that the British go to be tourists in Africa (I'm not trying to minimize the true problems of poverty in non-Western countries - but the systems of a person's life are very complex, and money flow is just one small part of those systems).

It's funny, because in my part of the world, in temperate North America... we have these four seasons and I always am saddened by wintertime, because we Anglos have this habit of becoming more reserved and insular in the wintertime. I would have thought than in a land where summer is year round - like Hawaii - people would actually have a developed a healthier year-round social rhythm. Sadly, however, I see that it's not the case.

I'm kind of scouting out universities where I might want to finish my bachelor's degree... and I was very disillusioned with the University of Hawaii on Oahu. The buildings were dilapidated... and a lot of classes were being held in very run-down "portable" classrooms. There was a newer campus area for the U of H in Hilo which was better - but it was very small - definitely a community college size school. It seems to me as if Hawaii really doesn't have much of a tax base. I noticed that even though the cost of goods over there tended to be higher than the mainland, the total municipal/county/state sales tax was only like 4% or 5% which is a rate unheard of in the USA. I kind of think that Hawaii has a libertarian economic streak to itself - people don't like paying taxes and so all the public infrastructure is pretty run down.

Geographically, Hawaii was an amazing place. The island of Kauai has a dry miniature Grand Canyon in the west, and then the wettest spot on earth in the mountains of the east; it's ringed with tropical beaches, and has lots of picturesque rivers and waterfalls. I visited the black sand beach of Waipio on the eastern side of the island. You have to walk down a very steep paved road to get to the beach (most vehicles aren't able to drive it). It's an incredibly aesthetic experience. I was with a guy I met at the hostel, and we decided to hike in to a waterfall which is some distance away from the beach. It's fun, because you have to walk through the river again and again on the way up there; the trail was wiped out years ago in a series of mudslides.

The more wealthy areas of Hawaii are culturally very similar to the Rocky Mountain tourist town where I live. While on my bicycle, I thought about what it would be like to live on Maui... and I realised that it's so much like where I live now. If I was ten years younger, I might have chosen to make Maui my home rather than the Rocky Mountains. At this point of my life, however - it's kind of like "been there, done that." I'm looking for different horizons.

One fascinating thing about Hawaii is that it's culturally very much related to the west coast of the USA. It's as if every little town represents a subculture of a kind of people you might see on the West Coast. Eugene Oregon has an outpost on Kauai called Kapaa. Centralia Washington has an outpost on Kauai called Kekaha. Marin County California has the outposts of Kihei on Maui and the Kona coast on the Big Island.

A lot of personal insights came to me in Hawaii. I learned a lot about myself. But this post is already getting quite long, and I won't share all these things, today.

I've been asked on occasion by acquaintances why I don't wear a helmet when I'm bicycling. This is the best enunciated answer I can give to that. This is the thinking out of one of the most bicycle-loving countries in the world: Denmark.

What I've found personally, is that how you cycle is what makes the difference, when it comes to personal safety. I live in a small town, and always do my errands on the same routes - this means I have developed a very keen sense of all the hazards that lurk. I can ride on back streets, and I don't have to dart in and out of traffic like one has to in a big city. I know how to break my fall. One needs to rehearse in one's mind what you will do if you suddenly fall in any number of ways. Then in that split second, your reactions will be trained to meet the situation properly. Cars are the only real hazard that a skilled bicyclist faces. With good brakes, there's always time to stop or slow yourself down before a collision with a slow moving or stationary object.

The most important thing is being aware of the hazards in your environment. Mirrors are vital.

I finally decided to break down and pay a little money for a service which allows me to watch New Zealand television over the web. This kind of completes a virtual world tour I've done in the past few years of immersing myself in the television media from various other English-speaking countries. I'm glad to see my ideas confirmed - that New Zealand does seem to be the wonderful place I've been thinking it was.

I've seen these very stark differences in character between our sibling anglophone countries around the world. And it's even given me a lot of insight into myself and my own country to see how things are done abroad.

In a word, this is how I would characterize the national discourse of these different English-speaking countries:

• Britain is about reason
• Canada is about rationality
• Australia is about caring
• New Zealand is about idealism
• the USA is about formula/recipe

It's very important that people see the differences in national character of all of the different countries where one can live. Particularly for my lot - the intuitive intellectuals - it's very hard trying to make a go of it in the USA. The USA isn't a place where people discuss the why and the how. When a person starts discussing things on this level, he'll be facing social hardship really quickly. The USA is a place which makes its intellectuals into eccentrics, nerds, and introverts. It ostracizes its smart people - not intentionally - but just because of how people are accustomed to seeing their world, and living their daily lives.

Barack Obama is a shining example of a successful intellectual; he's learned how to hide it. He never discusses things at face value in interviews. Instead, he knows how to tell people what they want to hear. Therefore, he remains in good favor with the American people... where people like Margaret Atwood or David Suzuki or Dennis Kucinich or Noam Chomsky (or the countless other university professors who teach humanities-related subjects) never fare that well in the USA.

Not only does the USA have formulas for business, but it has moral, social and political formulas. Foreigners often decry the amount of religion in the USA... but it's really not true. It seems to me that nations like Australia are far more religious than the USA. However, the USA has moral formulas that may indeed be misguided at times. Why has the USA gone through these dramatic debates about communism, and homosexuality, and prohibition, and abolitionism and child labor, and civil rights? Because of moral and social formulas that people have a hard time setting aside.

At any rate, I agree with what Jon Stewart said yesterday at his "Rally to restore sanity" in Washington DC. I think intellectuals in the USA need to pipe down a little bit. They need to stop waging these verbal wars of antipathy. If they would look around them at the world a little more, they would see that the world is bigger than just the USA. Even if they see their own elected government officials as being clumsy and foolish - there are other options out there for places to live - other (more sensible) governments to live under.

I met a man today.

He was sitting next to me in the computer lab at my university. He saw me using Finale - a brand of music editing software - in order to map out a choral piece that my men's choir was doing. Immediately, he wanted to share his own music with me - he passed me his Iphone - which had an mp3 on it which he had composed. He had me watch a film he had made at a university where he transferred from. He remarked on a beautiful pencil drawing that someone had left on the scanner glass next to my machine - he said that's what he used to do in high school - when he was ignoring the teachers' lectures. He was very interested in Japanese culture. The more I think about him, this evening several hours later, the more steamed I get at this joke of an "education system" that has failed him. He's reminds me of myself. He has skills and talent and promise which he will probably never use in any professional sense - because no one has taken the time to mentor him. Instead, he was sold the same bill of goods that everyone else was, during his 13 or 14 years of education so far.

The education system in the USA at the secondary and tertiary level is all a farce, in my opinion. It's made up of people who pretend to teach their students. They aren't there to fulfill the needs of their students - they see their job as being wholly encompassed by meeting the responsibilities deigned by the department head, or the state standards. Test scores are the method by which these "teachers" pull off their charade. Standard test procedures are by no means an effective method of measuring what a student has actually learned. Students routinely put the information that is required for the test out of their mind as soon as the term is over. Besides that, information does not an education make. A true education is about inquiry, and curiousity, and passion, and application.

This evening I watched the third in a series of excellent BBC films about the history of mathematics. God, I love the BBC! I swear, I can learn more in a week of watching their programming than in a year or two of formal education at the university. In this program, they talked about the developments in mathematics by famous Europeans in the 1600s through the 1800s: Descartes, Fermat, Newton, Leibniz, the Bernoullis, Euler, Von Humboldt, and more. These are the sorts of people we should be trying to create in our universities. These folks were not specialists in one field. They were generalists. They were dilettantes - and they had the privilege of having the time to explore all their various interests, because they were valued by the royal class.

An honorable education system would have classrooms where teachers had their eyes peeled for their students' unique aptitudes and interests. Then, those students would be sent into coursework where those things were focused on more heavily.

The first step in designing this sort of curriculum would be change the question those who create the state standards ask themselves. When it comes to math, for example - the question should not be: "What will kids need to know when they step into a university classroom?" but rather: "When will these students need to use math, and why?" The same question should be asked about art, technology, history, and other subject areas.

I was recently up visiting the town I was raised in as a small boy. A lot of synthesis of ideas about one's life and one's world seems to happen when you go back to these places. One big realization came to me upon assessing the town newspaper, and the corresponding zeitgeist of the community. People in the town are definitely not happy people. They're rednecks in the worst sense of the word. I can see the writers of the newspaper try to be very conscientious in how they approach things... yet and still, they are failing their community. The intellectuals who write the articles, or select them from the national wire, don't see the negative impact that they're having on the zeitgeist of the community.

I think it's one of the bigger problems in our society that intellectuals assume that everybody has the maturity level to think critically about things that they read. In reality, most of society is comprised of simple ordinary people. These are people who take the world at face value, and are likely to accept what writers say at face value as well.

Consider the difference in tone between this Associated Press article:

BILLINGS - Billings police say a fire that gutted an apartment hours after a domestic disturbance call may have been deliberately set.

The fire was reported shortly after 1:30 a.m. Sunday. It caused an estimated $150,000 worth of damage, but no one was injured.

Sgt. Jason Gartner says police had been called to the apartment shortly before 10 p.m. Saturday for a domestic disturbance. A 21-year-old woman reported her boyfriend had choked her, put his hands over her mouth and held her to the ground.

Gartner says when the woman tried to call police, the boyfriend left with the phone. The woman was in a neighboring apartment when the fire started.

Nathan Searsdodd was arrested Sunday morning on suspicion of partner or family member assault.

And this article which I just found today on one of the two main news websites in New Zealand (http://www.stuff.co.nz).

The body of a New Zealand tourist, reportedly brutally murdered, has been found on a surf beach in Bali.

A Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesman said Jordan Lucas had died in Bali and his family was being provided with consular assistance.

Mr Lucas' body was found at Uluwatu Beach, a popular surf beach in South Bali.

Indonesian media are reporting that police believe he was murdered.

Police said the man, found semi-naked with his head crushed, was the victim of a murder, The Jakarta Globe reported.

"He was a lovely kid, a lovely boy who just loved Bali. He was here for four months just surfing. I've known him for a long time and that's all he loved - surfing," a relative in Bali told the New Zealand Herald.

"It's just a terrible thing. His parents are understandably just terribly distraught - they've only just found out."

The Ministry said the family had requested privacy and would not release any further details.

In both cases, the details about what occurred are in short supply - and the writers have to be very brief because of that. The New Zealand article however, is much more palatable. The tone of it doesn't alarm folks. There's a note about what kind of cool guy the victim was. There's a note about how the parents feel about the matter. There's a note about how the family is getting help from the consulate.

The AP article, on the other hand, is nothing but doom and gloom. It would be very disconcerting for a person to read that, who was just an ordinary joe or jane. A simple minded person who didn't understand how newspaper authors spin stories in order to make them more edgy would be disturbed by it. The meat of the story is hearsay - a brief sequence of events at the apartment as related by those involved. There is no broader context about how long the folks lived in the neighborhood, what they did for a living in Billings, and other things like that. Furthermore, the writer heavily favors speculation over fact. The idea that the fire was deliberately set seems to be a guess on the part of the police. The way the prose is but together, makes me think that perhaps the author would rather be a film noir movie script writer. Maybe she or he missed her calling.

The impact of the prose of each article on the ordinary reader is very different - even though, in both cases, the event being described is extremely tragic.

I honestly think that the USA would be a much better country, if its journalists were conscientious enough to consider the impact of their style of writing on the minds of people who are ordinary simple folk. Canada and New Zealand, it seems to me, are much happier societies with healthier ways of discussing social issues - and I think it's because of how journalists ply their trade in those countries.

Also, recently, I visited my sister in San Francisco, and read through the Chronicle. It's a wonderful paper if you are particularly intellectually disposed. However, again, most people wouldn't see the beauty in the prose. They would see an ugly narrative about class struggle which is woven throughout the paper's stories.

I also passed through Portland, and Salt Lake City in recent weeks. Those papers (the Oregonian, and the Salt Lake City Tribune, I believe do far better at improving the attitudes and vision of people in their cities. They do it, however, in a weird way. They deconstruct the spectres that most other papers in the nation are creating as they make people scared of criminals, or terrorists or whatever else is out there. For example, the other day the only article I saw in the Tribune about the Middle East happened to be about a flood in Pakistan. So the threat there is to the local people, from a natural disaster - rather than the threat from terrorists to people in the USA. Another example of this deconstruction was a front page story about a gentleman who was a prisoner trying to get his footing in the community after doing his prison time. I applaud the gesture of such journalists. However, they still are playing defense, as writers, rather than going on the offense. They'll still needlessly playing up drama.

We need clean, proper prose in our newspapers to encourage social health, as much as we need clean air, and clean water for our physical health.

This is an interesting npr article about how educated parents are much more likely to have autistic children than uneducated parents:

• Listen to the article at npr.org

The folks talking about the topic come to a conclusion which is a fairly standard misconception: "Other kids must have the illness and are just slipping through the cracks."

I remember at the university, the field that offended me the most was the field of psychology - and especially developmental psychology. There are some really serious flaws in the way that these people reason about how the mind works. The best way I can approach talking about this is to say that the mind is not static - it's dynamic. The mind is not a thing that can be studied like a rock. It can't be broken apart and it's nature understood by looking at its component parts. People are dynamic - they have wills, they have perspectives and worldviews. And they act within that world which they see around them.

The absolutely worst thing you can do to anybody - a child, a spouse, or even yourself - is to believe that the person "has a problem." A hindrance can exist, ineptitude can exist, a puzzle can exist - but to say you have "a problem" is to adopt the belief that you have a quality about your person that makes you unable to excel, or to succeed in your endeavors. And this is simply not true.

The worst kind of problem you can believe that you have - is a problem thinking - a problem with your mind. If you believe you can't think or reason well - that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, so to speak. You need to have faith in your fundamental ability to think, in order to do it halfway decently, and to learn how to do it better. That's how the mind works. Think about this one: if a person were swimming across a lake, and were to suddenly doubt his or her ability to swim - what would happen? That person might drown. If you have no faith in your ability, you cannot pursue the task - and this kind of task is a very important undertaking - and in that case, one's immediate well being depends on keeping your head above water, and reaching the other shore. And so, I reason that placing a label on a child is one of the most abusive things adults can do to that child. Parents need to believe in their children. They need to see them as those who are changing and growing and coming into their own. Now, certainly there are special circumstances where a child has a serious developmental problem - cerebral palsy, for example... but those are very rare situations.

My greatest passion in life is thinking and reasoning about stuff. I became firm in this pursuit a decade ago, when I decided to research a little bit about historical european philosophers such as Kant, Nietzsche, Aristotle, and Descarte. I didn't get very far in their works, but in the first chapters and prologues of important pieces of these folks' work a lot of important tenets of reasoning are laid out. And I decided it made sense to sit down and think everything through for myself.

Over the past several years I've had my eyes glued to the social politics in the Usa around me - during the Bush administration, and now during the Obama administration. I've made several forays in sharing my thoughts with others anonymously in various contexts on the internet. My conclusion has been that I really can't try to make a living as a writer. First of all, the numbers aren't there. The pool of literature out there which is available for readers is so large, that it's near impossible for one author to gather enough fans to support him in his work. Furthermore, publishers have the markets tuned in a way that benefits their own industry, and not the author's pocketbook.

But there was also something much more dark that made me see that there wasn't a place for my essays in the world I saw around me. And that is that there is a very pervasive campaign against innovative and progressive left-wing thinking in the States. And a person who proposes cultural changes can end up with his life being destroyed by those who wish to campaign against him.

And the prejudices against innovative thinkers run throughout the height and breadth in our society as well. I've been assistant director for a children's play this fall and winter, and I see the same social dynamic that I had to deal with as a boy growing up in the 1970s. I see that smart kids develop social impediments because their parents don't understand their nature, or their arc in life. And boys have it tougher, in this area.

Recently, I've been studying Australia through their mass media's internet audio and video streams... and I see a mirror image of the Usa. There, the left wingers have a monopoly on the mass media. It's fascinating that Rupert Murdoch is an Australian by birth - I can see how a frustrated, dejected right wing thinker would want to strike back at those who had ostracised him and his colleagues. I see the same tricks in the mass media of Australia, that are used in the mass media in the Usa. When there is dissent from right wing thinkers about something or other, the journalists will momentarily acknowledge that dissent... but then they'll go back to hammering in the left wing message. So, to see the mirror image of what happens in the Usa is very educational. As George Carlin mentioned one time "The table is tilted, the game is rigged' in the Usa. And the same is true in Australia.

This is a fascinating discussion which I found on an Australian public radio website about Bhutan. GNH (Gross National Happiness) is a very central concept in how the Bhutanese people choose to forge their society's future. And it's great to see that Australians are forward thinking enough to see the power of this idea.

While other countries pursue "Gross National Product" - the Bhutanese will be looking for "Gross National Happiness." I'll leave it to you to conclude who will be more successful at achieving fulfilled and happy lives.

• Listen to the program (11 megabyte mp3)

In recent years, mass media organisations in other Western countries have begun to make their daily offerings available over the internet. I have taken this opportunity to study first Canada, and then New Zealand, and now Australia. Learning another language is a big hurdle, and makes a deep assessment of other countries difficult, at first. My family has ties with Japan, and China. But I never have really explored those cultures as I might someday.

But it's stunning to me to see the different attitudes and perspectives on things that you find even in other english speaking countries. Now that I've studied a few other countries, I think of my nature as being very similar to New Zealand people. A lot of things in that society resonate with my own life, and my own perspective on things - from how I view children, to an appreciation of christian culture, to the attitude of working together with minority groups of folks. And I think it's really important that everybody finds their own people as they grow into adulthood. When I was a young man, the first town I moved to was a tourist/college town in the Rocky Mountains. And in later years, I moved back there, because the town tugged on my heartstrings. And now, I'm seeing an even better home for myself, perhaps, in Australasia.

Over the past several years, I've intently studied politics and society in the Usa. And these days it really irks me that academics in this country remain stuck within the narrative of the competition between the left wing and the right wing here in the Usa. The right wing in the Usa has had the seat of power forever. It's fascinating how that happens. It seems as if when the republicans get too far off the beam, members of their party defect to the democrats, but take their right wing ideology with them. And so, what happens, is that right wing ideology permeates both major political parties in Washington DC. And this means that there's really no chance for left wingers to ever succeed in winning the debate against the right wingers. To quote George Carlin: "The table is tilted, the game is rigged." And so one shouldn't spend all this time trying to change a country which is not going to change. It's better to vote with your feet. One thing I've seen as I've studied society and politics in other english-speaking nations, is that there really isn't ever any big ideological difference between members of the left wing party, and members of the right wing party. However, citizens of those countries imagine that there's a big difference, because dissidents are always trying to spark some changes of policies using the party that's out of power at the moment. It's tragic, though, that people don't know a way of seeing what's going on in the social and political dynamic of other countries. The real differences are between countries. New Zealand, for example, shows us a country where both the left wing and the right wing are what we, across the Pacific would call "progressive" parties. In Australia, the right wing party is the "Liberal Party," and the left wing party is "the Labour Party." Australasia really is governed primarily by the left wing. The left wing has a hegemony on politics, in the same way that the right wing has a corner on the market when it comes to government power in anglophone north america.

So, if you're a die-hard left-winger in north america... don't spend your life trying to fix the Usa. Move to Australasia, instead.

Or you might choose Canada. Canada is a country which really honours science, and it sees itself as a very rationalistic society. It has policies which we consider left-wing in the States - such as gay-marriage, and universal health care. However, in all honesty, these policies are tools in the hands of a society which wishes to remain very socially conservative. Canada's government policies keep order in the country. Whereas in the Usa, we believe in individuals deciding for themselves how to live their lives - and we trust that the consensus of all these individuals will create good communities and cities for us to live in.

One thing I have also seen - is that: As Canada is to the Usa - so New Zealand is to Australia. Canada is a dissident country. It guards against the problems it sees in the Usa, and so that contrariness kind of defines its national character. In the same manner, New Zealand is a dissident country - which wants to be different than Australia. There's a running joke about saints and sinners which relates to the history of how Australia started as a british prison colony - and New Zealand was founded by christian missionaries. In some sense, I think Canada and New Zealand don't always succeed as they would like to, only because they err on the side of idealism, rather than pragmatism.

Another thing I've seen is that there are a few serious problems that happen when left wing ideologies are employed in such a thorough way in a country.

• In New Zealand, for example... people don't sue. Left wingers in the Usa always shake their heads and sigh at the litigious nature of our society here. However, one sees problems in New Zealand where food safety and worker safety is not given the kind of fastiduous attention it is given in the States.

• Also, in New Zealand, small businesses don't seem to recognise the importance of seeking venture capital. I see stories in their television news of people starting small businesses which really won't be effective at profiting - but which are more done by a solitary person who had a little dream she or he wants to fulfill. For example, the other day there was a story of a guy who bought several brand new luxury sports cars, and is going to give people a chance to drive these things at high speeds on a private race track. That's all well and good - but it's not going to employ a lot of people... and it's not going to be effective at uplifting the economy in New Zealand. For some contrast, we can look at Tesla Motors and Aptera motors in the States. These companies have millions in venture capital, and are trying to reshape the auto industry altogether. Tesla is creating luxury electric cars which sell for $100,000 a piece. And Aptera is creating futuristic looking hyper-aerodynamic and efficient vehicles.