One of the reasons why I left Italy was that Italians talk and argue about politics constantly, as if all you had to do was to cast a vote to some mythical "right party" to fix all the problems at once.

Recently I've been reading the Italian news again, between the plain ansa.it and the opinionated beppegrillo.it, the blog of Beppe Grillo, a controversial standup comedian banned by TV for his political jokes and that later on gained some serious creed by predicting one of the biggest corporate scandals in Europe.
Mr. Grillo's blog is one of the most frequented in the World, now being translated in English and Japanese. But I doubt that many people outside Italy actually follow it as only the Italian version gets between 3000 and 4000 comments per post.. too many to make any sense of them, and frankly most of those comments are just random venting.

With Naples drowning in its own trash for almost half a year now, there is definitely a lot to talk about.
It seems that Italy managed to stop funds to one of our few Nobel Prize scientists, Carlo Rubbia, which is famous for nuclear research, and that has been working on using solar energy. The research was first founded in Italy, but then he had to move to Spain... while the Italian politicians are pushing for Nuclear energy (banned by a referendum 20 years ago) and at the same time burning trash with cancer-facilitating incinerators, that for the occasion have been renamed as "thermo-valuers".

At the root of all this there is culture. Italians are not altruistic at all and are relatively ignorant on how things go about in the rest of the World.
One could argue that the United States of America is also a fairly closed country where news feeds are rather limited (see Anna Miller's 2008 talk on TED).
USA however is a country with so much active research and development. It gathers the brightest minds from all over the World and to some extent it can afford to have the general population not being too concerned or too educated about what happens outside (there goes the Iraq war..).

Back to the Italian situation. I believe the country needs people to simply go to school, study a lot, study scientific matters, develop logical skills and also study abroad.
We need more and more people to stick their necks outside and see on a practical level how things work in the rest of the World. You can't improve much if you have no practical experience of what other countries are doing right.
In the short term however, before the average cultural level grows, we need to start making sure that people that end up with political power are not your "average Luigi".
People need to face that for a special job one needs special people.
A person with power to govern should have, first of all, a basic moral integrity. A stable personality, great intelligence and motivation (aside from getting rich and powerful !).
Not everyone needs to be a physics Nobel Prize, but that would be ideal.

Most of all, politicians mental abilities and economic activities should be constantly monitored. There should be periodical reviews in which politicians' goals and achievements are being shown to the greater population (leaving some room for national security, but not too much).

Basically, I want to know that whoever is taking decisions for me is actually more fit than me, if not, then I should be doing his job !
Politics shouldn't be a career, it should be a service. Granted that experience is a key factor in everything, but experience is also an excuse for people to get lazy and to make huge mistakes on the behalf of millions and millions of people.
Being a politicians is a job of great responsibilities, it ought to employ the brightest minds and put them constantly under scrutiny !

..in the meantime, Italian parliament and senate includes convicted criminals and shady individuals.
Get those out first !

I've been quite busy with work and social life.
With the winter season, some friends came to Tokyo for business and fun. That took quite a chunk of my free time. It's always nice to meet old friends, but that affects my Internet activity 8)
Friends from Italy keep insisting that the situation in Rome is getting worse every year. With people from poor countries flowing in large numbers and criminality raising. While keeping the same old culture of inefficiency and rudeness towards customers.
Oh well, at least Rome doesn't have trash rotting in the streets like for Naples 8)
If you plan to travel to Italy, don't go to Naples. Italians themselves try to avoid it. You'll get robbed, but you'll get robbed in Rome, too. ..what a great country Italy has become !
Italians themselves complain a lot, but it's never enough. They can't really tell because they normally don't see any better. Try to live in Tokyo, then go back to Italy, and notice the difference.
Every Italian, by law, should have to try go live in an a more civilized country, to learn and spread.

By the way, it's official that (romantic) relationships do suck.
The thing that is really strange in relationships is how one can profess love to a person for years and then just stop seeing that person. It takes a long time to shake that off (at least for me !). It's a lengthy painful process, an emotional roller coaster generated by the fact that as two people come apart they slowly get out of sync with their high and low mood states (? whatever ! 8).

Moving on is however usually the best solution. In relationships and in life in general. The trick is to balance things.. how much time and effort should one put into something before giving up ?
The one gives up on something and suddenly it seems like it was one minute too soon. Tricky !!

In my previous post, I ranted on how people should rather come earlier from work and try learn some English or an alternative language (it was aimed mostly to the workaholic Japanese readers).

And so, speaking of languages, which one is the most difficult to learn ?

It's hard to tell, because a language isn't a set of grammar rules/exceptions and words. Understanding a language can be easy or not easy. In many cases a broader culture is needed to grasp the true meaning of words.

I did a quick search and I found that, apparently, Italian is not so hard to learn after all... in my ass !! Fuck that.. Italian IS hard. From a grammatical standpoint it completely obliterates Japanese and Chinese, which I hear it has a very simple grammar.  read more »

Yesterday I had interesting discussion with one gentleman from UK living in Asia for 18 years. In fact we discussed less about Asia but about how the world degrades. In his opinion his student times were terrible. Neo-nazis, communists, everyone expecting 3rd World War and so on, however today, with maybe more stable world the danger comes from low level of society. I fully agree on this matter and I can spot things how we degrade. It is enough to look at language that youngsters use. People stopped paying attention to grammar, correct spelling or even basic things like capitalization within sentences. I am not any good writer but at least I try to pay attention to basics. Other thing is handwriting. When I was young we were pushed by teachers to write in our notebooks with correct hand writing. So that we could use the notes and others could read them. Today youngsters (mostly) write like chickens with their legs. Even I have figured out change in my handwriting.  read more »

I recently got involved into some heated debated on the net on the blog of some guy that I deem to be egocentric to the point that his reasoning is being obfuscated by his own ego.

The debate is not closed yet, but it was interesting to argue in a blog's commentary context. Here are a few things I learned from this:

• A person's blog is a person's home: get ready to have to argue against him or her supporters.. which is basically all of them because..
  • Most people following someone's personal blog are supporters
  • Most against the blog's owner aren't going to criticize him on his own blog, especially when supporters are already active
  • Some sort of mob is created at some point you will be reminded how many (biased) people are against you
• Human spoken and written language can be interpreted in many ways. Holy wars are still being fought because of different interpretations of some ancient fiction ! (read: The Bible)
• Italians are very proud people (it's an Italian blog). They are very proud but not very self-critical and hardly ever efficient.

Since I've been playing around with AdSense, I've been thinking about web sites
popoularity.
If I wanted to render this site more popoular I'd have to sell out its soul,
more or less.

There was never too much real effort towards popoularizing kazzuya.com. At some
point I tried to post some "cool news" but it didn't feel right.
Posting news is the easiest way to draw traffic. One doesn't really have to do
much other than selecting interesting stuff left and right without even writing
personal thoughts about it.
The news thing works if more than one person is active. With 5-6 people copying
and pasting some text with some links , one can get a continuous stream of news
that are likely to make people come back.. however, in the RSS feeds era, it's
possible that too many news will overload people and have them unlink the site.
Re-shuffling news would make me feel guilty though. Guilty of trying to hook
people to read random bullshit, to waste time to stay "informed" rather than
being active developing something !

It's also worth noting that:  read more »