To have the cover of TIME magazine devoted to Monti is more than deserved. The spread is under control. The bund no longer causes fear. The public debt is still the same as before, but it already has a better appearance. It almost seems rejuvenated. The Great Public Works are not stopping. The most important American base in Europe at Vicenza is not under discussion. If there’s a war, we are the first target, but we are proud of that. Our troops are joyfully safeguarding Afghanistan ("In Afghanistan marciam, il perchè non lo sappiam” {in Afghanistan we’re marching, but we don’t know why}). Italy is participating in the embargo against Iran. What more do you want from a faithful ally? A few nuclear warheads to look after at Aviano and at Ghedi Torre? No problem. They’re already there. Nuclear is banned in Italy but the nuclear weapons of the stars and stripes are always welcome like the memorable American bombings on our cities in the Second World War.
CDSs are spurting out from all the pores of the American banks. “L'enfant du pays” Mario has gone back home to Goldman Sachs, where he has spent the best years of his life. The Americans must love us, otherwise why have they not gone away since pitching their tents in 1945?
Veni, Vidi, Monti. Better than Julius Caesar in Gaul. The defeated ones are the unemployed, the companies that close down, the young people who flee abroad in tens of thousands, the pensioners who will die in the work place, the employees without rights. We are just at the beginning. When we get to the magnificence experienced by Greece, with mass sackings, and widespread poverty, Monti will win the Oscar for the best protagonist stuntman, the Nobel in Stockholm for the Recession and the Order of the Golden Spur from the hands of Ratzinger. Monti is not “amerikano”, he’s just a bit tanned. Obama loves him. It’s a banking affection, the one that stands up to everything and lasts over time.

The gas that we import gets thrown out of the window. We could halve imports. In fact we waste at least half. The efficiency of our generating stations goes from 35% to 55%. Furthermore, the Italian energy system is strongly centralised and this brings about losses in the distribution. If we add in that the passive houses, that consume 15 kw/m2 per year, between 10 and 15 times less than a normal house, are almost non-existent, you can understand in whose hands we are. A national energy plan is more than ever urgent and necessary.

Interview with Paolo Ermani, president of the Paea Association



The strategy of programmed suicide
Greetings to all the friends of Beppe Grillo’s blog. My name is Paolo Ermani of the Paea Association and for a long time I have been dealing with energy issues, saving energy, and renewable energy. The current situation, regarding gas and the interruption of supply in recent days is the offspring of a system that is absolutely irrational and inadequate. The energy system in Italy is heavily centralised. The centralisation is the root of all the waste and all the blackouts.

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The advantages of thermal insulation
The solutions given by the expersts are: “If our problem is dependency, let’s increase dependency. If our problem is the greenhouse effect, let’s increase the greenhouse effect.” But why act like this? Because the first and only thought of the energy monopolists is their wallet, and these people have absolutely no interest in safeguarding the environment and the people, even because there have been similar crises in the past,

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Energy saving on a par with wellbeing
We have Marchionne who still belongs to the Pleistocene era who still wants to sell cars in Italy in a country where there are more vehicles than people with driving licences, thus if one thinks that from these people the solutions are forthcoming, we can abandon every hope. But in fact we ourselves can place many solutions on the table.

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The PDL and the PDminusL have met up to avoid the “electoral shattering” and to bring “bipolarism” to fulfilment. Basically to have just two parties in Parliament. It’s the supersedence of the “Porcellum”: the "Merdellum”. Berlusconi and Bersani want to raise the bar, perhaps to 8%, cutting out smaller parties and the MoVimento 5 Stelle {5 Star MoVement}. There’s the risk that 50 to 60% of the voters including those that won’t go to vote because of the nausea, thus most of the country, have no representatives in Parliament The certified end of democracy. From Mussolini’s “Only Party” to the P2’s “ Two Twin Parties”. These individuals who have destroyed the Nation and who talk too much of “electoral shattering” have shattered my balls. What “shattering” are they talking about? In Parliament two coalitions have been elected: PDL and Lega, and PDminusL and IdV, and the UDC of cuffarian electoral memory. Two plus one. What arithmetic are La Russa and Violante going on about? The appeal for the discussion table came from Berlusconi, the most disqualified politician in the entire globe. The PDminusL immediately replied like the most willing of the “escorts”. When it has to give it, it never draws back. To exclude the country from representation to propose once more the same faces in Parliament that have shelved it, and to prevent campaign groups from coming in is a serious action that can bring unpredictable consequences especially with the development of the crisis.
We have understood for some time that this lot don’t want to go away. For them, democracy is an optional. They are not subject to the laws nor to the orders of the public prosecutor's offices when there is a request to have access to the current account of the party, as happened for la Margherita and Lusi yesterday in the Senate. I insist that the accounts of the parties should be available online with the evidence for each individual transaction. I insist that the money not spent for the reimbursement of election expenses should be returned to the State. A part of this money is even coming from my taxes. The press presents headlines about election agreements with great pomp, as though it were a victory and not a defeat for democracy. There are days when I wonder why on earth I’m doing this. Sometimes I don’t know how to answer. I look at myself in the mirror, a bit older and a bit more befuddled. Today however, I have no doubts. The response is anger. They will never give up (but is it in their interests?). Neither will we. See you in parliament unless they do an electoral law that prevents that.

The MoVimento 5 Stelle {5 Star MoVement} is defending the freedom to demonstrate for everyone within the laws. Who can place themselves above the laws? Just an outlaw or a journalist in bad faith. If the law forbids a demonstration, then it has to be the law, the prefecture to forbid it. To want to substitute the law with a decision of the town council, as has happened at Rimini, to prohibit Forza Nuova from using the square today, and perhaps tomorrow to prohibit anyone else, is against democracy. Voltaire said: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." The MoVimento 5 Stelle wants “liberty for the fascists” thunder the farts of the deep space, the hacks and the politicians with a pong under their noses that every day are looking for a needle in the arsehole of the MoVimento 5 Stelle. The Emilia Romagna regional councillor Defranceschi declared: “It’s not up to us, nor is it up to the Majority to decide who can demonstrate and who cannot, because it’s everyone’s right. It’s the Prefect that has to decide who can come out into the streets. It’s clear that we are condemning xenophobia and those who affirm that they want to burn books as though we had gone back to the nazi-fascist era. But there’s the need to be coherent. So when the Lega say they want to remove the tricolour from the squares, when Bossi says he wants to clean his backside with our national flag, are those demonstrations to be authorised? Forza Nuova should probably be declared illegal but I repeat, this decision is not up to us.” I agree!
Do you remember the second Vday in Turin when the libertarian voices of the Left attacked the demonstration dedicated to the freedom of information? We were the fascists ....
"I grillini come Mussolini” {the Grillo supporters like Mussolini} was the headline at that time of an article in Micromega that also wrote: “Grillo supporters are too permissive” in relation to “the obscurantist and avowedly violent spirit of the black extremism ....”
Pertini, as President of the Lower House, reaffirmed the right of each deputy to be able to express himself without being interrupted, making particular reference to Almirante’s MSI people. Was Pertini a fascist? Are the journalists intellectually honest?

The hamster wheel is turning, turning. We only ever stop to have a bite to eat and to sleep, but every morning the wheel awaits us. The more we move our little paws the less we think about things. One day, however, we will climb off the wheel and break out of our cage in order to follow our dreams. But when will that be? Tomorrow, the day after, or next year perhaps? Old men getting a minimum state pension? When will it be the right time to make a change and try to have a better life if not now?

Author Simone Perotti's Passaparola:

Thinking, examining and making changes.
Good day to all the friends of Beppe Grillo’s Blog. My name is Simone Perotti. I’m an author who worked in a company for 19 years before deciding to spend all of my time writing and sailing. I became a sailor in order to survive before my books began to become successful and to this day I continue to be a sailor, a skipper if you will, as well as a sailing instructor. I also clean boats and I do anything else that is related to the sea. Everything we do in life we normally do for one of two reasons, either for love or because we are forced to, in which case, any downsizing will no longer be the result of a personal choice as it has been for many people in recent years, in fact more so than what we may think, but rather the result of necessity since the great promise made by the System, namely that we would all leave the countryside and eventually even the factories to live in the city, and we would all have a collar and tie, a desk, a motorcar, a house and a middle class life will never materialise and is never going to happen. The system is no longer in a position to drain all the working resources to which it once had easy access, so it cannot provide what it promised and it can no longer provide wellbeing as promised so, in other words, it was either just one big lie or at least a serious error of judgement. The most serious and most unpleasant thing about the way things stand at the moment is the fact that the main role players in this system, the ones that actually conceived it and developed it are not doing any soul-searching whatsoever. I would perhaps still be prepared to accept the errors that were made and accept that it was all done in good faith … but now, unfortunately, things have become all too clear and what we need to hear is someone saying “We made a mistake!” We cannot accept a system such as this capitalist system that promises wellbeing for all and is then unable to deliver what has been promised, so our current capitalist system needs to be reviewed, and that’s something that people like Berlinguer, Pasolini and many others were already talking about back in 1977.
But no one listened to them. The time has come to do some serious soul-searching, yet neither Monti nor anyone else is doing any soul-searching and this is not a good thing. People cannot simply be expected to accept a change of direction without the leader admitting that mistakes were made in the first place.
There is no question that this downsizing has to take place and it is going to involve taking 1, 2, 3, 4 or perhaps 10 steps backward, which is obviously not going to be a painless process. When something is done for love, the motivation is strong and there is a certain amount of conviction involved. However, something that is done through necessity is different. These things have to be done without delay, immediately, even though these steps backward are going to be difficult for everyone that hasn’t been able to plan for them. Those people who have been living in a more sustainable manner for some time already, trying to consume less and spending less time at work because the extra income was not actually essential for living, in other words, those who have thought about the problem of consuming less, being more free and not having to work quite as hard, but doing just what is necessary in order to live, are now going to be far better off. The system needs to be changed because it is unsustainable and because there is another way that has to be looked at. It seems to me that our intellectuals and our economists have not made any attempt to come up with a new, workable system. We went from being a monarchy to being a Republic by first developing the political theory of Republicanism, a move away from feudalism and other earlier systems, by developing a new concept of organisation, but this is the first time in history that we will be changing from one system to another without anyone having sat down and theorised first, except perhaps for a few marginalised and vilified downsizing theorists who have given this some thought.
In any event, we have to change, even in the absence of any sort of guidelines, and this places the onus squarely on the shoulders of individuals who, as individuals, have to think it through, examine the options and then bring about change.

Getting back in touch with reality
Downsizing does not mean sitting on the couch and doing nothing all day, or not working simply for the satisfaction of being a lazy slob. Downsizing is a new model for development, not a plan for involution or non participation in the daily liturgy of an economy that is condemned to either grow or collapse. It doesn’t mean not having anything else to do and indeed not wishing to do anything at all. What it means is doing just enough and no more, consuming only what is actually necessary and no more, envisaging a kind of development of our Country that is based on different things since our Country has no energy resources or mineral wealth, and based on other things that are far more important, such as our landscapes and our many abandoned villages that need to be recovered. New construction is not possible because we don’t have the room, so we have to recover our earlier and even ancient buildings that are just sitting there waiting to be renovated, inter alia also in order to protect the land from the landslides and ground collapses that are increasingly becoming regular events. What we need to do is to clean up this Country so as to turn it into a garden and to clean up our seas. Simply cleaning up our coastline and our seas will keep tens of thousands of people busy for a good long time, while turning this Country into a veritable mecca for tourism and the hotel trade. We need to produce electricity in a different manner because things simply have to be powered by energy other than that obtained by burning hydrocarbons. There are many things that need to be done, but the problem is that no one is currently developing any plans without any philosophical flights of fantasy.
For me the choice was very simple. I worked for 19 years and I even had a pretty good career. I began as a temporary worker and in the end I landed up as a manager. I was very fortunate. I worked very hard and I believed everything that I was told, namely that if I worked hard and gave my all I would reap the benefits of the widespread growth. At a certain point, however, one day I simply realised that this was not so. I was working extremely hard, as a matter of fact all I was doing was working and I no longer had any time left to do the things that are important to me. The money that all my hard work brought in was needed to purchase useless things and indeed, more often than not, I was driven to spend money that I didn’t even have, using credit facilities to purchase things that I had to have in order to impress heaven alone knows who. This system was not bringing me any wellbeing at all, so at that point one has to do one’s sums and ask oneself “Is what I am doing making me feel good? Am I happy?”. I believe that life is like a recipe and a good recipe does not consist of only one ingredient, it needs many ingredients that are well mixed and well balanced and although this is merely my personal opinion, that was no longer my situation. I’m standing here wearing 4 or 5 jerseys, one on top of the other, because my house is ice-cold since I don’t have any central heating. All I can do is burn wood in the fireplace and that’s how I keep warm, standing a metre and a half away from the fireplace. As I move away from the fire, the house is ice-cold, but this has no effect whatsoever on my happiness or unhappiness, it’s simply a choice that I have made.
Every time I need to buy something, I tie myself to a cost that involves me becoming a slave and since these are not the things that make me truly happy, I would rather live with the problem of feeling cold in winter or having to resort to putting in a major effort to chop wood in order to warm myself up. I have realised that this kind of hard work is not something that is to be avoided at all costs, but rather something that is to be welcomed because all that lack of hard work that I perceive as being a comfortable office in Milan, or a hyper-heated home that swallows up tons of crude oil on a daily basis, that way of life, that lack of effort is not an indispensable resource and, if anything, everyone needs to do a good bit of hard work in life because that is what keeps us in touch with reality.
It was possible to change lifestyle. It would have been enough to spend less, reduce your personal consumption and it would have been enough to live in a place where homes cost 300 Euro per square metre and not 6-thousand Euro like in the big towns and where, just in passing, it costs you far less to do the shopping and where you are not obliged to eat out in restaurants 4 times a week and spend 6 or 7-Thousand Euro a year but you can cook at home instead. Here in La Spezia I eat fish morning, noon and night because that is one of the things that costs less and it is absolutely doable. My electricity bill for two months amounts to 15 or 18 Euro, I produce a good part of what I eat and yet I can still do far more, especially since I have just begun. This is just the beginning of a whole new life. I’m finding it hard, by all means, and over time I will learn to do other things even better, but it is by no means impossible. The only life that is impossible is the one that they tell us we should live, life in a big town doing jobs that we certainly would not have chosen if we had followed our true passion, earning money and seeking certainty. But how on earth can you seek certainty in a life in which the only real certainty is that we will die by the time we get to 90 years of age? Am I going to die any earlier just because I changed job? I too will die at 90, but at least in the meantime I will have tried my best to live because the other option would be death. These are our fears, fed by the advertising and disinformation, which would have us believe that if you leave your job, you’re screwed and if you opt out of the System you will never be able to go back.

Taking back our time
The rarest commodity around is time. Time, however, has one particularity, namely that while it is said that even money comes and goes, time goes and that’s it. Seneca knew this only too well two thousand years ago already, as did the pre-Socratics, the philosophy that has attempted to steer mankind in certain directions over time, and universal culture. We are the only ones that don’t appear to have realised this yet so, as if we had all the time in the world, we seem to continue to waste time from morning to evening throughout our life, doing things that don’t matter, in an attempt to live our lives in the most original and authentic manner possible, as if we have so much time to blow anyway and the time will come to do the things that really count. But the truth is that the perfect time will never come because that time is now. From now until then, assuming of course that that time will indeed come, we will have wasted time and this simple concept is reason enough for us to seek to change our own way of life. Since I stopped going to the office every day and began living on very little, I have tried to make the best possible use of my time. I live in a very different way and I feel a lot better for it because I now have lots of plans and lots of dreams to fulfil. The time at my disposal is now spent entirely on fulfilling those dreams, it is all for me and for the people that I love, who I can now finally go and visit. How sad are those telephone conversations, often with our best friend rather than a mere acquaintance, as and when we contact each other and the half of our conversation goes something like this: “Hi, how are you? It’s been too long, but you know how it goes…we really should get together again one of these evenings and spend some time together”, knowing full well that it’s not going to happen because we spend all of our time in the company of people that we never chose in the first place, more often than not with work colleagues that have been imposed on us and that we would dearly love to strangle with our bare hands but don’t, thank the Lord.
All that time is a treasure that we have wasted and that should make us lie awake at night, just thinking about how guilty we are of wasting so much time. One of the most urgent things that we have to do, crisis or no crisis, is precisely to take back control over our time and to try to live what we have left of our short time on Earth to the fullest because the truth is that we may not live to be 90, we could just as well die tomorrow due to illness or some other perfectly normal cause, something that actually happens to many. Furthermore, there are certain people walking around who are extremely superstitious and refuse to talk about such things. Now I don’t know where these people come from, perhaps from the Middle Ages, but those of us who, I trust, are modern people, can calmly discuss the fact that we could realistically die at any moment and we know not when that moment will be. The Gospel warns us to “Stay alert for ye know not when nor whence…”. Now I’m not Catholic, in fact I’m anticlerical, but I must admit that that is great book that we should somehow listen to.
Goodbye all and spread the word!

Every so often we need to play. Today’s game is to change Italy’s past. To go back in time and get a slaughter to fail, delay a meeting, prevent a murder, get a law approved - or not approved. Not just the important events, even situations that are apparently insignificant, but are such that they can cause a “butterfly effect” as discussed in Ray Bradbury’s story “A Sound of Thunder”. That idea that tiny changes in the past can produce great effects in our present. There is just so much choice.
On Sunday 19 July 1992 hiring a breakdown van in Palermo and shifting the car to via D’Amelio, in front of the building where Paolo Borsellino’s mother lived. Antonio Caponnetto said: “Twenty days before the attack, Paolo had asked the Questura to arrange for the removal of vehicles in the area in front of his mother’s home. But the request was not put into action. Even today I’m waiting to find out the name of the civil servant responsible for Paolo’s safety.” Perhaps Borsellino would have become the President of the Republic instead of Napolitano. A dream! On 16 March 1978 going through the Monte Mario neighbourhood in Rome, to the home of Aldo Moro and obliging his body guards to make a deviation to avoid via Fani. Italy would thus not have been handed over to Andreotti-the-guy-subject-to-the Statute-of-Limitations, companion of mafia-guys and protector of Sindona, who on that very day presented his new government to Parliament. If Craxi had not fled, there would not have been Berlusconi and twenty years of berlusconi-ism and anti berlusconi-ism, while the country was collapsing one day at a time. Between the two, the choice is complicated, like it is between a stroke and a heart attack, but Craxi has not been with us for years and his disciple is alive and kicking and will remain among us for who knows how much longer. It would be possible to try to see the effect it has. On 17 February 1992 stopping the entrepreneur Luca Magni at the entrance to the “Pio Albergo Trivulzio” in Milan while he was carrying the envelope to Mario Chiesa (who was caught red-handed while he was trying to get rid of the bank notes down the toilet). “Mani Pulite” {the criminal investigation whose code name translates to “Clean Hands”} would never have existed. Craxi or Berlusconi? This is the dilemma. In the Autumn of 1998, kidnapping Prodi and hiding him in a hole in the mountainous plateau of La Sila to prevent the entrance into the Euro. On 27 October 1962 in Catania obliging the pilot, di Mattei, to inspect the “Morane-Saulnier MS-760 Paris” aircraft that then exploded during flight because of a bomb. We would have kicked out the “Seven Sisters” for the “Dog with 6 legs” (logo of the Italian energy company - ENI} and perhaps the History of the Middle East would have been better.
What would you change as a time traveller?