Review of Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia by John Dickie

The widespread view of the Mafia is that which is portrayed in Hollywood films, and in particular The Godfather trilogy and Goodfellas. Undoubtedly, the characters in these films are mostly vicious thugs bent on making money by all means possible, but nevertheless they are presented as stylish, cocky and seemingly untouchable.

This portrayal is also aided by common terms for the Mafia in their Sicilian homeland – ‘men of honour’ and ‘men of respect’ being the most commonly used two.

John Dickie effectively smashes this romantic picture of the Cosa Nostra by chronicling a continuous level of depraved wretchedness and ruthlessness that is surely unparalleled by any other crime syndicate anywhere else in Europe or America.

Forming in the 1860s off the backs of the profitable Sicilian citrus export business, they reached their apex during the Cold War years when there was an effective alliance of convenience between business, the Church, Christian Democrats, fascists and the Mafia.

This alliance led to one of the most ruthless and effective challenges to the organised left seen in Western Europe.

This antagonism to trade unions and socialists began in the late nineteenth century when local peasants began to organise for rights and land – the Cosa Nostra (translation: ‘our thing’) saw this as a threat to their hold over local society and responded with violence and intimidation. This was repeated again and again during the twentieth century.

John Dickie highlights the utter contempt they show for anything but profit, and those considered legitimate targets range from not just those on the left but also even on the right, magistrates and priests, and, in particular, their own syndicate members. Whoever attempts to stand in their way will be vulnerable to assassination.

Not only have they been principle players in the international heroin trade, but, as the author writes, ‘Cosa Nostra treats all public wealth, no matter how essential – water sources, roads, hospitals, schools – as potential plunder’.

Although Dickie’s book occasionally lapses into a plodding pedestrian style, on the whole he does tell the story of this secret society with enough detail and passion.

By the end of this book I confidently state that you will be longing for the day when the Cosa Nostra scab is finally picked from the face of humanity.

Technorati claim: CGCASWRBVWJ4

Joining the “dofollow” community and attracting more visitors to your blog

Technorati estimate that there are over 175,000 new blogs created everyday. Of those blogs in existence there are 18 updates per second, or 1.6 million posts per day.

This is a phenomenal amount of blogging and if you have started your own blog you may well wonder how you will find an audience amongst so many other bloggers.

The truth is, you’ve got a hard job on your hands to find a readership. There is absolutely no doubt that anybody in the blogosphere will advise you that you need good quality regular content. No matter what tricks you pull to attract new visitors they will not come back again unless you offer great content for your niched.

It is fine now and again to write short items promoting other people’s work or a video you have found on YouTube. But the meat of your blog must be interesting, well-researched and well-thought through articles. If you love the niche you are part of then this will come naturally.

Don’t start off with massive amounts of enthusiasm and then a few months later sagging because you have burnt yourself out. It’s best not to publish more than one post per week or you’ll quickly run out of ideas – quality takes time, and quality beats quantity all the time.

Don’t expect more than 10 visitors to you blog on any one day during the first six months of its life. For starters, it takes at least six to nine months before Google and Yahoo seriously begin to index the pages of you blog for inclusion in its ranking.

There are many, many ways of publicising your blog. You could add it to MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog and then start interacting with other bloggers in your niche, you could also post up the URL in the  forums that you are a part of. Don’t forget to submit it to some free directories.

Another way is to join the “dofollow” community.

In January 2005 Google introduced the nofollow attribute. This adds the following to the HTML code in a link: rel=”nofollow”. Simplified, this puts a sign on the door by telling the search engine bot not to count the webpage it is pointing to in its ranking calculations, and as every person involved in SEO will tell you: build lots of inbound quality links in order to do well in the search engines.

Over night in 2005 the Google game changed as blogging platforms like Wordpess slapped nofollow all over blog comments. Millions and millions of links were now discounted.

Some bloggers though were not happy about this change. They knew that this wouldn’t stop spam and so continued to leave off the nofollow attribute. This became known as “dofollow”, although in actual fact there is no code which reads dofollow.

These refuseniks wanted to reward their regular commentators with a little link love. Why shouldn’t they receive a little boost for the time they take to engage with my blog, they theorised.

“Dofollow” is an incentive for your readers to comment often and come back regularly.

So, if you are a blog owner then how do you make a switch to “dofollow”?

Well, that depends on what software you use. The best idea is to visit DoFollow and read the article “Dofollow” Guidelines for Webmasters and Bloggers.

Google launches Firefox addon for webmasters to test the speed of their web page

Google has just released Page Speed, a tool for Firefox/Firebug. It lists all factors on a page that could cause unnecessary download lags for users.

Features covered include gzip compression, browser caching, using efficient CSS selectors (the less descendants the better) and the need to minify Javascript.

As broadband penetration is now over 95% in the UK these sort of factors only seriously come into play when designing a high traffic website and potentially high bandwidth costs have to be a consideration. If you are in east London then visit Stratford web design for all your digital needs.

What’s so attracting about this little tool is that previously it was used by in-house Google technicians and developers, so its usefulness is assured.

Previously I used the Web Page Analyzer, but I’ll be using Page Speed too from here on in.

Review of 1968: The Year That Rocked The World by Mark Kurlansky

The Sixties is the decade that refuses to end. We seem to be riding on a continuous wave of nostalgia and reflection to the extent that all adults have experienced their own slice of the Sixties even if they weren’t born until after 1970. The attraction is obvious, as the appealing first page of quotes in this book show: ‘Millions of young people all over the world,’ the iconoclastic William Boroughs wrote, ‘are fed up with shallow unworthy authority running on a platform of bullshit.’ Right on, brother!

The Sixties is now a period saturated with historiography that comes from every angle: cultural, economic, or political. It would seem that there is little new ground to cover, so Mark Kurlansky has set himself a hard task with his homage to the decade in ‘1968: The Year That Rocked the World.’

Kurlansky is the author of now legendary books ‘Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World’ and ‘The Basque History of the World’, and has built a reputation for adding colour to underreported aspects of history. So it comes as a little surprise that he should pick an era already well covered. It seems doubtful that he started with one year in mind, but with the Sixties in general. Although great claim is made for 1968 being a particularly special year, this really is a book on how the decade impinged on different societies and nations around the world.
In particular, the central role of twenty-something youth, who may have not necessarily have been the leaders of the social and political movements, but were certainly the shock-troops in countries as far apart as China, America, France and Cuba.

Kurlansky’s narrative is one of emphasising the centrality of youth amongst the new regional and international currents, but also of concentrating on individuals who found themselves elevated onto the world stage – sometimes with careerist determination, such as the American clowns Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, other times with naive hopefulness, such as with Alexander Dubcek, or complete surprise, as with Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

The new radical Left movements, the political backbone of the times, were more diverse and multifaceted then had been seen since the late nineteenth century. Less ideologically dogmatic than their ‘old’ Left counterparts, they were refreshingly playful with art, language and strategy. Needless to say, there was a ridiculous side to this youthful approach (LSD and pot are never going to change the world), but amongst this there came some inventive and original forms of protest, an example being, the invigorating posters – called atelier popular – being produced in their hundreds from the arts schools of the Sorbonne in the spring of ’68.

The New Left – a label that covered Trotskyites, anarchists and various shades of libertarian thought – were hostile to the Soviet Union block, critical of perceived ideological corruption and weakness. Instead, they looked to China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and its self-declared aim of cutting out political decay. They also looked to Cuba, which, although surviving on Soviet subsidies, was seen by many on the New Left as the vibrant progressive society that the USSR had long ceased to be.
Generally speaking though, the only issue that united this so-called counter-culture was opposition to the Vietnam War, with an American defeat looking possible after the New Year’s Tet Offensive.

In response to the new movements the attitude of the various Communist Party’s was, according to Kulansky, mixed. In America the CPUSA was hostile to such movements as Black Power, while the French CP actively undermined the May strikes. In Czechoslovakia, the CP was split with one side leading the revolt while the other supported the reaction. Which, in the case of the latter, reflected in the Comintern with only ten of the 88 Communist Parties in the world approving of the Red Army invasion.

Mark Kurlansky’s Sixties odyssey is more than just a single year in one decade, with interesting backdrops provided to 1968’s events. For instance, he supplies an illuminating account of how the American media establishment fawned over Castro’s rebels before the Revolution, while a thorough explanation is given to the post-war political machinations of the Eastern Block that reveals discontent and confusion from the top to bottom of society.

Granted, of the world’s population, few were active within or connected to the movements that Mark Kurlansky writes about, with many indifferent TV-watchers more concerned with the geraniums in their allotment than with Franz Fannon or Herbert Marcuse; but then social change has always been the prerogative of the minority. To quote a well-used saying, freedom is a road seldom travelled by the multitudes. Kurlansky competently remembers that particular Sixties road with verve.

‘1968’ may not necessarily break new ground, but it certainly covers old ground with a lively pace.

Review of Heaven on Earth by Joshua Muravchik

Sub-headed ‘The Rise and Fall of Socialism’ and complementary quotes from Vaclav Havel, Christopher Hitchens and Paul Johnson on the dust jacket hardly makes this an appealing book on initial inspection.

A closer look also throws up more problems. The subject matter of a history and critique of world socialism from the French onwards means that whole episodes and complex arguments have to be ditched to satisfy a 345-page limit.

The style of writing also begs questions with the author choosing to concentrate on a series of prominent individual leaders that start from Babeuf and then proceeds through Owen, Marx, Lenin, Attlee and Gorbachev amongst many others. This is a particularly problematic approach considering that the whole raison d’être of socialism is the ascent and supremacy of the masses. Although maybe Joshue Muravchik was led to this form of analysis by the left themselves who spent much of the twentieth century in unhealthy hero worship of certain individuals.

Part of the problem is just what the author defines as socialism, with the index at the back naming countries as diverse as India, Iraq and Tunisia, but nevertheless, the last century is littered with failed leftist social experiments. There is plenty for Joshua Muravchik to pick from.

It’s not to deny that much of his criticism is valid – central command economies have rarely delivered and often just combusted with little long-term benefits to the people, but the central argument he presents is quite disturbing – that is, co-operative efforts are doomed to fail.

In reaching this conclusion he often falls for silly Cold War arguments, for instance, the October 1917 revolution becomes that old chestnut, a ‘coup’.
It’s not to deny that

Introducing the QtWeb web browser

The what web browser you may ask? The QtWeb – an Open Source project released under the GNU licence and based on the WekKit rendering engine which Chrome and Safari use.

If you want to compare to the most popular browsers on the market then take a look at this chart: http://www.qtweb.net/compare.php

This is from November 2009 and matters have moved on since then, but it is worth noting that QtWeb was the first browser to score 100 out of 100 in the Acid3 test  which checks for CSS and DOM capabilities. As of May 2010, the browsers that now score the maximum 100 are Safari, Chrome and Opera (IE8 only reaches 22 out of 100).

In you are in east London then don’t hesitate to seek out Bethnal Green web design

Using the SunSpider JavaScript performance test  it’s slower than the Chrome and Opera (which is the fastest on the market), but many times faster than IE8.

You can also use it – unlike any other browser – as a stand-a-lone without installing it, although the biggest let down is its lack of third-party plug-ins.

If you use seek the services of web design Hackney then they’ll make sure that you’re website will look great in any browser.

Out of force of habit I’m still mostly using Firefox but Chrome seems to be rapidly becoming the choice of browser for developers. The latest version of Opera (10.53) is really fantastic and for the first time in ten years it really is a leader of the pack.