Oh God…

At $280 Google is valued at $78 Billion. That’s 50% more than the combined value of all the publicly traded newspaper groups in the US combined. Analysts seem to be happy with this, though, with CSFB forecasting a share price of $350 which would be nearly 75 times projected earnings for this year. Any of this seem familiar? People I speak to (I mean people who are supposed to know what they’re talking about) say this is all cool because Google has so much room for growth in its core business (advertising) and lots of new, as-yet-unimagined businesses lined up ready for launch. It gives me sweaty palms, though. (figures from Breaking Views, by the way).

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A car

Because I am basically a small boy I find myself linking, almost automatically, to this preview of the 2007 Ford Shelby GT500. Like many men of my age, I retain an almost perfect photographic memory of every car made anywhere in the world in the years up to and including my fourteenth birthday. For some reason, after that, everything gets a bit blurry (“is it a Chevette? A Scimitar? A Capri?”). The Shelby Mustangs are an early Seventies highlight of my personal photographic record (take a minute to remember just how grey and boring things were in suburban Britain thirty-five years ago) so Ford’s retro clone caught my attention – I reckon it’s something to do with that top stripe (Oh. And Bullitt). Forgive me.

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More radio gems

You’ll cry. You will. This programme (MP3) about a scheme encouraging imprisoned parents to record bedtime stories for their kids at home is a gem. And before you get on your Daily Mail high horse about yet another indulgence for pampered convicts, take note that parents who retain an emotional connection with their kids through a prison sentence are markedly less likely to re-offend once on the outside (enjoy, especially, the convict reading Burglar Bill to his kid at home). Also a gem (although you’re less likely to cry) is Matthew Paris’ lovely Archive Hour (MP3) about the first half century of the motor car in Britain.

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Europe 2.0?

It’s an epic defeat for the European establishment but that doesn’t make it a victory for the isolationists and sceptics. Once the dust settles, once Giscard’s Napoleonic (and paralysingly boring) constitution has been abandoned, this moment might just look like a real opportunity for the radical European middle. For people, like me, who believe in a Europe of social solidarity, peace and economic cooperation, built on the consent of its citizens, but who don’t want a monolithic, State-like entity at the centre and don’t want it to have a constitution at all. Constitutions are for States (and Bowls clubs). The EU wants to be a State. It’s probably inevitable that any big, trans-national institution will aspire to Statehood but it’s the job of the National component parts to counter this accretion of power and ambition at the centre.

These edge-and-centre disputes are as old as the nation state and the cyclical shift of power from imperial centre to ragged edge and back again is the historic norm. Since the French and Dutch ‘no’ votes, we’ve already heard Euro legislators and national leaders saying things like ‘one way or another, this treaty must be enacted’. That’s not only undemocratic, it’s a short-sighted refusal of the opportunity to re-engineer the EU as a 21st Century alliance of States, regions and communities, organised like a network and governed, from its edges, by its people.

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