As Oscar Wilde said: “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”

But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them.

These days, we’re living in the world of the imperial, very self-interested individual; the man in the gray flannel suit has been replaced by the man in the very expensive Armani suit. Look at the protagonists in the global financial meltdown, and you won’t see faceless corporations subverting individual will; you’ll see avaricious individuals exploiting corporate forms to enrich themselves, often bringing the corporations down in the process. Lehman, AIG, Anglo-Irish, etc. were not cases of immortal hive-minds at work; they were cases of kleptocrats run wild.

And when it comes to the subversion of the political process — yes, there are faceless corporations in the mix, but the really dastardly players have names and large individual fortunes; Koch brothers, anyone?

If you ask how it’s possible that a handful of bad actors can get their way so often, the answer has to be, wasn’t it ever thus? What we call civilization has usually been a form of kleptocracy, varying mainly in its efficiency (the Romans were no nicer than the barbarians, just more orderly). Yes, we’ve had a few generations of government somewhat of, by, for the people in some places — but that’s an outlier in the broader sweep of things.

Desperate not to be kettled again, the young people who marched out of schools and workplaces and occupied universities all over the city veered away from several attempted containments and diverted into side streets, determined to make it to the seat of government to make their voices heard. When they got there they broke down the barriers surrounding the symbolic heart of the mother of parliaments and surged into the square for a huge party, dancing to dubstep, the soundtrack of this organic youth revolution. Besides the apocalyptic bonfires and thudding drums in the containment area, dazed and battered protesters share out rolling tobacco and carby snacks. “Hey, look at this!” giggles one girl, “I’m eating Kettle Chips in a Kettle!”

This time, unlike the first three big days of action, there certainly is violence on both sides. Whilst some students came prepared, even bringing a portable tea-and-cake tent complete with minature pagoda to the kettle, others have brought sticks and paint bombs to hurl at the police. In the face of fellow protesters screaming at them not to “give the coppers a reason to hit us”, stones are thrown at horses as angry young people try to deter the animals from advancing.

Many of these young people come from extremely deprived backgrounds, from communities where violence is a routine way of gaining respect and status. They have grown up learning that the only sure route out of a lifetime of poverty and violence is education – and now that education has been made inaccessible for many of them. Meanwhile, when children deface the statue of a racist, imperialist prime minister who ordered the military to march on protesting miners, the press calls it violence. When children are left bleeding into their brains after being attacked by the police, the press calls it legitimate force.

More than 60 people have signed up as regular visitors to Cyberdyne Studio, a walking-training version of the usual fitness clubs that opened in September in Tsukuba City northeast of Tokyo, using the lower-limb model

…

Sankai is now in talks with foreign companies such as France’s Bouygue construction group.
“We are exploring cooperation outside the medical and welfare field, for ways to help heavy physical work,” he said.
Bayer MaterialScience in the German conglomerate Bayer announced in October it would help Cyberdyne replace metal parts with high-quality plastics to pave the way for easier and cheaper production of the complex shaped suit.
HAL will also be tried out in hospitals in Denmark and Sweden.

The Gulf Oasis would have been a shallow inland basin exposed from about 75,000 years ago until 8,000 years ago, forming the southern tip of the Fertile Crescent, according to historical sea-level records.

And it would have been an ideal refuge from the harsh deserts surrounding it, with fresh water supplied by the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun and Wadi Baton Rivers, as well as by upwelling springs, Rose said. And during the last ice age when conditions were at their driest, this basin would’ve been at its largest.

In fact, in recent years, archaeologists have turned up evidence of a wave of human settlements along the shores of the Gulf dating to about 7,500 years ago.

“Where before there had been but a handful of scattered hunting camps, suddenly, over 60 new archaeological sites appear virtually overnight,” Rose said. “These settlements boast well-built, permanent stone houses, long-distance trade networks, elaborately decorated pottery, domesticated animals, and even evidence for one of the oldest boats in the world.”

Rather than quickly evolving settlements, Rose thinks precursor populations did exist but have remained hidden beneath the Gulf. [History’s Most Overlooked Mysteries]

“Perhaps it is no coincidence that the founding of such remarkably well developed communities along the shoreline corresponds with the flooding of the Persian Gulf basin around 8,000 years ago,” Rose said. “These new colonists may have come from the heart of the Gulf, displaced by rising water levels that plunged the once fertile landscape beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean.”

Imaginary futures soon become outdated in a fast-changing world. And the nearer they are to the present, the faster they decay. The futures that suffer most are those so immediate as to be seized by the present and hauled aboard, annexed into the cultural matrix. Though the present cannot simply reach out and grab the hypothetical hardware imagined by science-fiction writers, it can lay firm claim to the softer aspects of the fiction: the attitudes, the ambitions, the vocabularies of words and ideas.