As a Twitter neophyte I’m still learning about the strange new universe of Tweets, Followers, Following – and the weird ‘Trending Topics’ list on the right hand side of my page.

Some things remain utterly mysterious.

Stephen Fry: super-human Twittering powers

I looked up Stephen Fry, a celebrated Twitterer famous (in part) for his many followers. As of today there are 666,355 of them. That is a lot!

But what really amazed me was how many Twitterers Stephen Fry is following. According to today’s statistics, he follows 54,877 other Twits!

How can Fry possibly find the time? Does he have a small army of assistant Twitterers to predigest Tweets that show up on his page – and report on the Tweets he really needs to know about?

Or is there a technological fix that enables Master Twitterers to read hundreds of thousands of Tweets per day?

Locating a Stash: Today's Trending Topic for the Twittering masses

This morning I noticed Find Marijuana has been a Trending Topic for several hours. After it reached No 1 my curiosity finally got the better of me.

I clicked the link to arrive at a page of seemingly random Twitterers, all tweeting away merrily about what a giggle it is that Find Marijuana has become a Trending Topic.

How in Twitter’s name did that happen? Is it a genuine expression of random global whim? Has a network of mischievous Twitterers conspired to bump the topic into the top ten?  Could it be a gigantic surveillance operation by the combined drugs squads of participating nations?

In July 1974, I hitch-hiked through the Algarve along the beautiful southern coastline of Portugal. One evening I arrived at a small fishing village as night fell.

People Power in Lisbon, 1974

Like the rest of the country, that patch of Portugal was in the throes of momentus change. Autocracy dating from the 1930s had been overthrown earlier the same year. Politics were in flux. For the first time in decades, the left was in the ascendancy. The spirit of change – and new possibilities – was in the air.

I was equipped with a bag to ‘sleep rough’ if necessary, but decided to ask a local if he knew somewhere cheap to stay. There weren’t any hostels or cheap hotels, but in broken English and a little French he outlined a solution, which eventually led to one of the most pleasant surprises of my trip. I was doubtful, but he insisted. So I followed him to the local Police Station.

After introductions, a courteous policeman welcomed me to his domain and assigned me a private cell for the night. It was sparse, but clean – rather like a monk’s quarters. He served breakfast in the morning: the perfect finale to a random act of kindness that left me fond of Portugal ever since.

So it comes as no surprise to me that the Portuguese are in the forefront of 21st Century law reform on at least one crucial social issue. Who else? The Portuguese are not lawless, but they seem to keep red tape in perspective.

This article was originally published elsewhere on October 11th 2008.

I’m republishing it now, in the light of recent reports that the Obama Administration may significantly INCREASE the level of US troops in Afghanistan. In the words of John Dryen:

“For those whom God to ruin has designed,
He fits for fate, and first destroys their mind”
________________________________

Remember the saga about Iraq’s missing WMDs?

They were ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that the American, British, Australian Governments and others, told us were in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. They presented ‘an immediate threat’. Fear of WMDs was the key rationale for attacking and invading Iraq in 2003.

But when we got there…ooops, they didn’t exist! A mystery!

Now the same nutters want to attack Iran, again because of the threat of WMDs. That is even though, last year, an irate US ‘intelligence community’, in an unprecedented act of independence from the American Administration, went public stating that Iran has no current nuclear weapons program – whatever Bush, Cheney, the Israelis (and Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers and TV channels) may say.

Further East is Afghanistan. It has many mysteries too. For instance, just where is Osama Bin Laden? Where is his video production department located?

Soldier in an Afghan poppy field