Jew appears, according to Google, approximately 1.5 million times on the web. Jews, in contrast, appears some 5.5 million times and Jewish some 13 million times. The top link for Jews is the website for “Jews for Jesus”, while for Jewish it is a commercial website at www.jewish.com. “Jews for Jesus” is, perhaps, not the ideal choice for the top site at Google for Jews, but at least it isn’t a plainly anti-semitic organisation.

Most English words for group identity appear in at most two forms - singular and plural, with the singular acting as the adjective. The only other comparable case I can think of in English - Turk, Turks, Turkish - has a comparable frequency distribution to what you get for Jew, Jews and Jewish. We feel more comfortable saying He’s Turkish than He’s a Turk, just as people are more likely to describe someone as Jewish than as a Jew. I’m somewhat curious why this should be. I sense little difference between saying someone is American or an American, but saying someone is a Jew or even a Turk always sounds a little bit like a condemnation when compared to Jewish or Turkish.

I have a theory about why. We hear the word Jew used with a pejorative intent more often than Jewish, and thus we are naturally inclined not to use when we have no pejorative intentions. This actually fits well with most theories about language acquistion. But it poses a problem: Why do we hesitate to use the word Turk?

My hypothesis is that the negative meaning we link to Jew, from the use of formulas like the Jew in racist screeds, has actually become attached to the formula itself. The German or the American is perhaps a bit less striking to the ear, but still gives me an expectation that it will be followed by a gross generalisation, stereotype, or piece of pure bollocks. For words like German or American, this has no impact on Google scores because the adjective is identical to the singular noun.

This effort at Google-bombing is harmless enough, but the real problem is in the relatively uncommon morphology of the lexeme Jew/Jews/Jewish. I wonder if a better approach might have been to try to reclaim the word Jew from the racism associated, albeit subtly, with its use. I am fairly sure that the negative connotations associated with the word are no less present in the minds of Jewish anglophones than other people. For instance, Jewish bloggers might prepare list of other bloggers, linking to each with the word Jew.

Perhaps not. The whole idea of preparing a list of people and “marking” them with the word Jew clearly recalls the Holocaust. But then, this is really a question of lexicology, and this is how successful lexicological campaigns have been conducted in the past: “Black is beautiful.” “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.” In order to reclaim a word, you have to use it.

As late as Summer 2000, I asked a business developer at EMI Germany about her thoughts with respect to mp3, file sharing and the future of her industry. At a time when mp3.com had already gone public, when the Napster battle was about to become nasty, a business developer at EMI Germany told me that the Internet was not yet a prominent part of their strategy. She was right, of course. The internet was only a big deal for their lobbying and legal departments. Despite some laudable efforts to change this – for major labels, the most important answer to the strategic challenges of digital distribution is still the law.

Certainly, even if the internet is not “one giant, out of control copying mashine”, as Hal Varian and Carl Shapiro wrote in “Information Rules”, its technological nature does trigger changes at the axiomatic core of economics. Brad DeLong and Michael Froomkin have laid this out in a paper called “Speculative Microeconomics for tomorrow’s economy” – I quote –

“This reciprocity-driven revenue stream may well be large enough that producers cover their costs and earn a healthy profit. Reciprocity is a basic mode of human behavior. People in the large do feel a moral obligation to tip cabdrivers and waiters. People do contribute to National Public Radio. But without excludability the belief that the market economy produces the optimal quantity of any commodity is hard to justify. Other forms of provision - public support funded by taxes that are not voluntary, for example - that had fatal disadvantages vis-a-vis the competitive market when excludability reigned may well deserve reexamination.”

In other words, we may enter a world in which Adam Smith’s prediction about the invisible hand might no longer hold true. Clearly that’s an earth-shattering thought, particularly given that economic history has taught us about the incentive nurturing nature of private property. And since we live in a world in which intellectual property is very likely more important than physical property, a reduced level of excludability is certainly not easy to even understand, much less to welcome. But welcome or not - information age societies will have to find a way to reconcile the advantages of internet driven “semiotic democratisation”, as Harvard’s William Fisher has called the slow digital lowering of entry barriers to cultural interchange, with a producer’s need to live from what they do. “Mass amateurisation”, blogs, open source, are a great way to socially benefit from positive external effects provided by volunteering human capital. But the same Human capital is usually also toiling in a day job to provide for the food for thought.

Don’t get me wrong. I very much welcome the end of the music industry’s “winner take all” market structure that reduced excludability is bringing about. I think it is great that the reduced expected return of any brand name piece of music distributed in the “classic” way is now opening up the market for labels that do a far better job at matching artists with people who love their music. But it must, in my opinion, also be clear that rights holders do have some legitimate concerns, which have to be addressed.

Unfortunately, the conventional, socialised, and certainly codified concept of property is not helping lawmakers to strike the new balance needed. However, it does help the music industry to protect their acquired position in the market. Telepolis’ Stefan Krempl (in German) may well be right to predict that last Monday was the day when an all-out copyright war was declared on Europe.

Not that the EU Parliament’s fast tracking of the Intellectual Property (IP) Enforcement Directive last Monday would have usually received much attention, but the events in Madrid that shocked Europe and the world certainly led to a complete premature burial of the subject in the major news outlets (see the list at the bottom of this wiki page for a press survey)

For the moment, the final amended version of the directive as agreed on in the first reading by the EU Parliament last Monday and accepted by the Council last Wednesday does not appear to be online – all I could find was an empty pdf-file

The most controversial issue regarding the content of the new directive is that is does not explicitly renounce to the criminal prosecution of non-commercial intellectual property rights infringements, like downloading songs from a p2p network for personal use. In fact, the directive leaves it open to national governments to hunt down file-sharers as they see fit. Adrian McMenamin, press officer for the European Parliamentary Labour Party states that “scare-tactics” have been used by the opponents of the directive – and he is certainly right that many of the most vocal opponents appear to not see the point of intellectual property protection at all - but I think it is rather naïve to claim that the directive does not create rather problematic incentives for national lawmakers. This directive certainly won’t make it easier to stand up for consumer rights in the face of a concerted right-holding effort. It seems, unfortunately, this directive will become another case study for “The Logic Of Collective Action”.

The most controversial formal issue regarding the directive is the Parliament’s rapporteur, the French UDF deputy Janelly Fourtou, the wife of Jean-René Fourtou, the current PDG of Vivendi Universal. While she is declaring “no financial interests” on her website, according to a vast variety of critics, she should have recused herself as rapporteur.

She should have, indeed. Just as she did in 1999, according to LeMonde , when she chose not to chair the environmental committee while her husband was CEO of the pharmaceutical company Aventis.

But it seems that this time the stakes were to high.

Frits Bolkestein, the commissioner in charge, may repeat as often as he wants that the intention of the directive is only to criminalise commercial infringements of intellectual property rights. But the ambiguity introduced into the directive by failing to clarify just that is certainly sufficient reason for concern when it comes to the true political intentions.

No doubt about it, revolutions are truly scary. And for just that reason, there are very few non-violent ones. After last Wednesday, chances of a socially problematic turn of the ongoing digital revolution have risen considerably for Europe.

His boss responded creatively: he contracted a hall with 200 workers in India. These workers spend their day typing the image responses manually into a data base. Currently they have entered something like 500,000 images. (It also occurs me that systematic spam must do something like this: the bacteria-antibiotic effect). The recounting of this story lead my Argentina blogging friend Marcelo to make the following highly perceptive observation:

The image of the wharehouse of people defeating the turing-test safeguards is extremely interesting. At the risk of sounding callous, I think that an interesting way of conceptualizing what’s happening in India and China is that Moore’s law is applying to humans: the capacity of a person you can rent for $1 is increasing fast, thanks to a bigger pool of people and better technology to teach and connect them. Of course the pool of people is finite, and eventually you start getting higher wages, but the principle is the same - and if stuff like MIT’s Open Courseware works well, the trend might well continue.

On my website deflation page I identify three factors which might be contributing to a global deflationary environment: OECD ageing, surplus labour in China (and now, increasingly, of course, India), and the falling price of information. Now I have never really been to clear where to go with this third one, it was more a case of reading Kurzweil and extrapolating what to me was the obvious. Now Marcelo has come along and put it very succinctly: Moore’s law as it applies to humans. And like the other version of the law, the only remaining question is how long can this run till we hit specific physical limits. I think Kurzweil’s answer would be: farther than you imagine.

The arrival of winter in this troubled land of medieval forts and Soviet-era apartment buildings invariably means one thing: another energy crisis. And so late last year the desperate government turned to U.S. officials for help.

With U.S. funds, a consulting firm was hired to take over the country’s electrical distribution system outside Tbilisi, the capital, but it did not take long for the American consultants to discover why Georgia is a nation that does not work. The power company the firm inherited in May was a tangle of creaky equipment, unpaid debt and widespread corruption. Only 10 percent of customers paid their bills.

The consultants decided to play tough. Delinquent customers would have their power turned off until they began paying. The Georgians’ response proved equally tough. In one region, the governor and his guards stormed a substation and flipped the power back on. A mayor in another area did the same, whipping out a gun and shooting a transmission insulator to prove he meant business. Subcontractors have been kidnapped by their own employees, and the consultants even had to break up a knife fight in the energy minister’s office.

The U.S. firm’s tribulations mirror a broader social breakdown in this country of 5 million. A dozen years after independence, the former Soviet republic in the Caucasus Mountains has become the archetype of a failed state, overwhelmed by poverty, stagnation, graft and separatist divisions.

“It’s just a big dysfunctional web,” said Dean White, a senior partner at PA Consulting Group, the U.S. firm struggling to fix the electrical system.

Years of frustration boiled over in parliamentary elections this month as nearly 80 percent of voters cast ballots for parties other than the bloc led by President Eduard Shevardnadze. And that was only the official tally. The vote was marred by massive fraud, according to U.S. and European observers, and thousands of protesters certain that the government stole what votes it did get have been in the streets of the capital for nearly two weeks demanding Shevardnadze’s resignation.

In the latest escalation, as many as 20,000 protesters marched to Shevardnadze’s headquarters at the State Chancellery on Friday and formed a human chain around the building.

The election may also have signaled a turning point in U.S. relations with Georgia. For the last decade, Washington has given Tbilisi special treatment out of gratitude to Shevardnadze for his role in ending the Cold War when he was Soviet foreign minister.

Successive U.S. administrations have funneled more than $1 billion to Georgia, one of the highest per capita rates in the world. The CIA trained Shevardnadze’s personal guards. President Bush dispatched Green Berets to train Georgians to deal with terrorists camped out in the lush but lawless Pankisi Gorge. “We used to be the darlings of Washington,” recalled Tedo Japaridze, the Georgian national security adviser, who has six aides whose salaries are paid by the U.S. State Department.

But now there are increasing signs that the long-indulgent United States has decided to stop cutting Shevardnadze so much slack.

In the run-up to the election, Bush publicly encouraged Shevardnadze to hold an honest vote and chose the most influential envoy he could find to deliver the message, former secretary of state James A. Baker III, Shevardnadze’s longtime friend from the final days of the Soviet Union. Baker came in July and pressured the Georgians into adopting a new election code.

To impress upon Shevardnadze the importance of the situation, more American luminaries followed, including Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), John M. Shalikashvili, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state.

In a last-minute intervention, Bush sent Shevardnadze a letter two days before the Nov. 2 vote imploring him “to conduct this upcoming election in a free, fair, peaceful, and transparent manner” and avoid “violence and intimidation as a political tool.”

The apparently rigged election left U.S. officials steaming. In an interview, U.S. Ambassador Richard M. Miles called the election “a mess” and “marred by massive irregularities and voter fraud.” More broadly, he said: “We’re disappointed at the slow pace of reform in Georgia. There are seemingly enormous difficulties in tackling very basic problems with corruption in this society. We would like to see stronger leadership and faster, more measurable progress.”

AES Corp., an Arlington-based firm that owned Tbilisi’s electric utility, pulled out of Georgia in July in frustration and sold its assets to Russia’s electric monopoly. Two months later, a U.S. aid official declared that, when it came to reform in the 27 former Soviet-bloc countries, “Georgia’s progress has slipped near the bottom.”

Even before the election, U.S. officials made their displeasure plain this fall by canceling a $14 million aid project to rehabilitate a hydroelectric plant and scaling back a program to help the Finance Ministry. They have threatened more aid reductions in February unless Georgia demonstrates progress according to certain benchmarks of reform.

“I think their patience is finished,” said Alexander Rondeli, president of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies.

Talbott said in an interview that the time had come for Washington to apply a tough-love policy to the Georgians. “If they can’t get the problem of corruption, and essentially corrupt politics, under control, then there’s not much hope for Georgia,” he said by telephone from New York. “Shevardnadze has this huge international prestige that he could have used … and all the preliminary evidence is that he decided not to do that.”

Japaridze, a former ambassador to Washington, said he sees the shift in the e-mails from the White House that he finds each morning when he arrives at the office. He added that Shevardnadze grasps the situation.

“He knows and understands better than anyone that Washington has a short memory,” Japaridze said in the State Chancellery building, over the shouts of protesters outside. “Yes, he helped bring down the Berlin Wall, and there will be nice words. But politics is about other issues.” Japaridze acknowledged that the election was deeply flawed and added, “We need to do our best to clean up this damage.”

Georgia was supposed to be a model of reform under Shevardnadze, but in recent years has seen mostly misery. Major industries have been taken over by powerful oligarchs, including some close to Shevardnadze. Georgians must pay bribes to get driver’s licenses, passports or university admission, to start a business and to avoid paying taxes or electric bills.

“There’s no segment in Georgian society without corruption,” said Ketevan Rostiashvili, director of the Georgian office of American University’s Transnational Crime & Corruption Center.

Pensioners receive $7 a month, and even that is often months late. Police officers are so poorly paid that protesters have been slipping them food across the barriers each night. Electricity has become such a precious commodity that the elevators in some tall buildings here will not work unless people feed coin boxes installed in them.

The shadow economy represents at least 60 percent of Georgia’s total. And even under the most optimistic growth scenario, according to Roman Tsiridze, an economist, it would take Georgia 12 years to catch up to where Bosnia is today.

One reason for that can be found at the Tbilisi factory run by David Bidzinashvili.

In the communist era, the sprawling factory compound employed 5,000 people and supplied shoes for sale throughout the Soviet bloc. Today, most of the buildings are used for storage and only the part bought by Bidzinashvili for $130,000 in 1990 is still operating, making uniforms for oil companies.

During his busiest season, he employs 380 people.

“We can’t compete with small illegal factories that don’t pay taxes,” said Bidzinashvili. “There are a lot of them, and they can produce as much as we do and they can sell cheaper.”

What’s more, Georgia is still in pieces. The territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia remain under the control of pro-Russian separatists.

The Pankisi Gorge was until last year the refuge of Chechen guerrillas and Arab terrorists. The autonomous region of Adzharia has its own military and does not defer to Shevardnadze, who is trying to make a deal with its leader to forge a parliamentary coalition.

The ripple effects of those divisions are visible in the heart of Tbilisi. Overlooking Republic Square, just behind a statue of Georgia’s 12th-century hero, King David the Builder, sits the run-down Iveria Hotel, its once proud sign rusted, its cold lobby dilapidated, its balconies covered by cheap plywood or blue plastic sheeting to create more rooms.

About 3,500 refugees from Abkhazia have been camped out at the Iveria for more than a decade waiting for a chance to go home. “We’ve heard promises for 10 years, but nothing has ever been done,” said Lamara Availiani, 69, who lives on the fourth floor in a small room with a cross and an icon on the wall. “We have no hope left.”

I can manage to work up one or two pointers which might get us back on track. You see, the interesting question to ask would be about how I got to meet Henry. And the answer would be that I found him because he linked to me (I normally follow new links back upstream to have a quick gander at just who might be crazy enough…..), and he linked to me because, for some reason I still haven’t fathomed, he got interested in my Indian Tech friend Rajesh, and this somehow sent him over to me.

Now I’m starting to get used to things like this, but when it first started happening, it was, I think, little short of mind blowing. Someone from Brazil, living in NY, zooms through Mumbai only to end up on top of my desk in Barcelona. Not only that, but it turns out we have a number of things in common. What I think I’m trying to say is that if this has never happened to you, it’s very hard to describe how you feel. My wife continually tells me that she can see from my face that something interesting has been happening, but beyond that there is no other external sign. She complains she has no way of telling what is important and what isn’t anymore. And the net is like this. Those of us who are in just can’t find any reasonable way of conveying the sensations to those who aren’t. The only strategy would seem to be preparing an experiential explanation - like one of those Borges maps which gives a more detailed specification than the space it is describing - which could offer a large as life version of the net itself. An astronaut must have similar problems after the flight.

And this brings me back to the core of this post. What I find is that my very conception of human contact - whether European or any other - is changing, and part of that change has to do with the loss of place, of physical location, as a determinant. I would say I had now a lot more friends, or people who I consider to be friends, than I had when I started blogging. But the strange thing about my new ’friends’ is that in the majority of cases I neither know what they look like, nor have I ever heard their voice. I think it’s worse: I think I’m getting to like it like this. In some ways you could say the contact is ’purer’: you have less to go on, you form your opinion without visual or auditory information, you get to use your imagination more. It is in a way a bit like reading a novel, and imagining the characters, simply by going on the author’s description and what he has them say. And yet, the strangest thing of all, I have the feeling I know the person I am communicating with, that I can like, or dislike them, just as I can like or dislike people in the physical world. Weird.

In the short term, this election is unlikely to have much of an effect on the rest of Europe - the Conservatives’ policy towards EU matters is unlikely to change greatly whoever becomes the leader (the Europhile Ken Clarke is unlikely to run, let alone win after his two previous defeats) - but the plight of the Conservative Party does mirror that of the other parties, both left and right, who dominated European politics in the 80s and 90s. Many parties had extended periods in office, but were then swept out in the mid to late 90s, often in landslide elections, and many continue to find it hard to mount effective opposition today - the obvious examples are the French Socialists and various Italian parties, though Spain’s PSOE and Germany’s Free Democrats (if not the CDU/CSU) also fit the pattern.

There has been discussion in Britain of the possibility of a ’realignment’ of British politics with the currently third placed Liberal Democrats (full disclosure: the party I belong to) passing the Conservatives to become the Opposition. While many Conservatives dismiss this as an unlikely scenario, there are precedents from Europe (and, of course, Canada) of seemingly dominant parties collapsing in a short time. Realignment is occurring in many European countries - there would be a certain irony if the process in Britain occurs because of the actions of the most Eurosceptic of the major parties.