On a surprisingly regular basis I get asked the question: ‘What would your empire be like, Seb?’

It always makes me stop and think. Who told you I’m planning to be an emperor…?

I don’t think I’ve told many people about my aspirations of world domination, but perhaps it’s the kind of thing that manifests and makes itself known in other ways. Maybe it’s the sparkly glint in my eye, or the grandiose sweep of my arms when discussing important issues. Who knows though, really. Humans have a way of picking up on things, right? And it would be stupid of me to deny something that is so plainly true. People will continue to ask me what my empire will be like — so it would be good to have some answers that I can give those that inquire.

And I have some answers. Not a complete manifesto of course — I guess I have another 15 years or so before the world will take an entire manifesto seriously. Damn my lack of senatorial grey hair and wrinkle-implied wisdom. But I have some ground rules, some ideas that would make it a grand and just and mighty empire.

Let’s call this My Manifesto, just for fun. In case any historians are reading: this is liable to change at any time — I haven’t finished travelling the world yet. So consider this manifesto in flux.

Starting at the beginning:

Education

Proper education for all. Plain and simple. ‘Proper’ is defined as ‘an education that prepares you for later on’. If the world wants to be a democracy, education will teach you political science and democracy. If the world wants to be a dictatorship, education should teach you how to be a good subject of the dictator. Remarkably little is actually learnt at school — and most of the ‘important’ things aren’t even touched upon. Probably because politicians/parents/?? are afraid of kids actually knowing what’s going on. Kids used to know so much about the world when they lived their education. Depending on what is important, that should be taught. It will vary from country to country, but it’s about time we actually teach useful knowledge.

This section has been expanded in its own entry

Politics

I’m split between dictatorship and democracy. Both have their merits. Democracy/bureaucracy doesn’t tend to get things done quickly. Perhaps a ‘temporary dictatorship’ system like the Romans? This requires the world to actually trust their leader(s) again though — something we haven’t had in a long time now. To successfully push through the changes in this manifesto you would need the support of an entire parliament/senate. Dictatorship would be easier… but that’s the trap, eh?

But I think if you have an educated populace, politics don’t matter quite so much. Politics is all about reaching a compromise between (wildly) varied points of view. Tyranny is easier because only one point of view matters. It works until that point of view is ‘wrong’ — that’s why you have democracy/bureaucracy, to ‘even out’ the wrongs, to make sure things don’t go too wrong. But you ‘even out’ the peaks as well as the troughs. The good bits get diluted. Why do our opinions and the opinions of lawmakers on important matters vary so much? Is it simply due to differing levels of education, knowledge and wisdom?

Research

Historically, most research funding is spent on defence — obviously, if I had a world-spanning empire, conventional military force wouldn’t be required. Planetary defences would be though. But this is a two-pronged thing: research into space travel also aids planetary defence. Many inventions and leaps in technology between 1900 and today have been off-shoots of military spending. But it’s time to move on now. We’re so ‘Earth-centric’ that we’re ignoring a frickin’ huge frontier that’s just begging to be explored. You would be shocked (or appalled) at the tiny budget allocated to space travel/research. We’re talking fractions of a percent of the annual budget. I think we need to care less about what we have now and more about what we could have. We need to give the explorers something to explore. They’re getting antsy, I assure you.

There’s more to it than simply ‘explore space’, but that’s a large part of it. Many corollary industries would surge forward too. Right now our inventions and technologies are very, very ‘Earth-centric’. Alter the playground, the locale, and the game changes. Just compare the kind of inventions we saw in the 1900s to the ones in the 200s. Compare motor vehicles to the Internet — and the sub-industries that have formed beneath each.

Welfare/Taxation

I quite like the concept of ‘flat tax‘, but I appreciate that my grasp of economic science isn’t perfect. Social support is a tricky one: how far do you extend the helping hand and deep pockets of state welfare? I think if we explored, our stockpile of available resources would expand at an alarming rate. There are other planets with resources like those of Earth. There are other places with gold nuggets literally dusting the landscape, just as they did when explorers first set foot on the New World of America. Resources dry up but the universe is almost infinitely large. Again, why are we so ‘Earth-centric’? I wonder if Big Oil (or national government even) realises just how much money they could make if they found a planet with oil or [insert some other fuel that hasn't been invented yet].

Taxing the rich is just one way of providing welfare. Would taxes need to be so high if our population density was lower and we had more natural resources? There are (I assume) always going to be people that need support from the state. There are other solutions than taxes.

Arts

You can’t begin to regulate the arts — they’re not something that should ever be under the jurisdiction of a government. Thankfully the days of artists being ‘commissioned’ to make self-adulatory statues or paintings of dictators are gone. Arts and artists simply need to be nurtured and they will flourish. I guess this ties into the ‘education’ section above because everyone’s an artist. You are artistic whether you like it or not — it’s just a matter of how easily or readily that art comes out! I have a feeling that making sure schools have adequate resources for the arts is another one of those ‘cheap, no-brainer’ things. I don’t think we need to worry too much about arts on a global scale — TV, film — I think we’re just all suffering a little from ‘cabin fever’ at the moment. All cooped up here on this fair planet with instantaneous communication and the equally instant/urgent need to satisfy our needs.

I know we’ve been static for a very tiny period relative to the entire history of humanity. But things are now moving quickly. The cogs are whirring but we’re standing still. We need to push forward now, towards the fringe, lest our own technology crushes us.

[Updated 30th November 2009]

No, not crocs like the ones in my full-frontal photo… crocs, like… Crocodile Dundee! This post references yesterday’s post on The 2010 Tour.

The next few weeks will probably see a flurry of posts about Africa and Asia. You’ll have to forgive me if that kind of thing doesn’t interest you — but this blog’s about what interests me! I’m sure I’ll throw in a few delicious curve balls to keep you on your toes anyway.

Unlike the Faroe Islands, a grand tour to either Asia or Africa requires a lot of planning. The Faroes, by virtue of their Danish owners, are one of the most developed nations in the world. The Asian countries rank higher on the ‘Quality-of-life’ index, but that might simply be because most of Africa hasn’t been ranked yet. I have a nagging feeling that Asia is probably safer… if it wasn’t for the earthquakes and tsnuamis and suicide bombings…

Only Mozambique and Tanzania are on the ‘least developed countries’ list (and Malawi and Madagascar, if I visit those) — and even then they’re doing better than the central African countries, with regard to GDP per capita and disease and genocidal maniacs. Malawi and Tanzania are both meant to be very safe. Madagascar has some really funky rules/customs incidentally, called ‘fady’ — in some towns you’re not allowed to wear specific colours, or eat certain foods. They’re handed down from the ancestors, or something like that.

Language-wise, most of east Africa speaks English. It’s not the ‘common’ language — more the stuff reserved to those that have been to college, or work in a modern sector. Short of learning Swahili, there isn’t really a better option though. I imagine most touristy folk speak English too. Over in Asia, the islands (Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, and I think Singapore) speak very good English. Not so great in Korea, Thailand, Cambodia — but if you wave some cash around, you can probably get most things simply by pointing. Including women (incidentally, you can get jailed for a looong time if you sleep with the wrong girls in most of Asia — not such a problem in Africa, but they’ve got HIV instead.)

Now, because I’m a photographer, I should probably highlight one ‘beautiful vista’ each time I make a post like this — first, so that you can whet your appetite; second, so that I can plan how best to photograph the landscapes of Africa… or Asia!

Because it’s easy, I’m going to start with Tanzania and their world-famous, omg-it’s-the-prettiest-place-in-the-world, Ngorongoro Crater — aka The Cradle of Civilization (hominid remains from 3 million years ago have been found there). With a name like that, it better deliver, right? Well… it does:

(Click for larger)

Within the crater there are zebra, gazelles, wildebeest (never understood why it’s spelt ‘beest’…) — even some rhinos and hippopotamuses!

The crater is a caldera, (102 square miles), created by a giant volcano that exploded and then collapsed in on itself. A pretty frackin’ big volcano. The fact that the crater is so ‘closed in’ apparently causes problems for some of the animals there — the lion colonies there are inbred! It’s just like the deep south…

There are tons more photos over on the Wiki page, and I’m sure on Flickr too — go have a look, if you can’t wait for my TOUR. I almost want to go purely because it’s called Ngorongoro — get this, the name comes from the sound of the drums used by a group of Masai warriors called ilkorongoro. They conquered the crater back in 1800, apparently.

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Anyway, with all the research (and some really pissy-grey weather that needs to stop already), I haven’t had a chance to take any pretty pictures this week. Unless you think a knife-wielding psycho is pretty (what were the chances?) — in which case you’re in luck!

(Black and white version over on Flickr. I like my eyelashes in the B&W one…)

(Stick a knife in me, I’m dun…)

(I’m holding a knife up! But you can’t see it, so this just looks like a stressed profile shot. Don’t think I’ve shown you my profile before, so… ta’da!)

Now to plan some kind of African safari slash/fan-fiction for TMI Thursday…

I was a little bit torn when titling (heehee) this post. Originally, I had planned to paint my face brown, make myself one of those conical rice-farmer hats and take some self-portraits in my garden. But Abi told me I couldn’t: ‘That’s just plain wrong, Seb. Think of the children.’ — and she’s right, it would’ve been completely insensitive and political suicide… but it would’ve been really damn funny. Ah well. Maybe I can still get a shot of myself in a conical rice-farmer hat when I visit ASIA!

Last week I looked at Africa, this week it’s Asia’s turn.

As a reminder, if you haven’t read about my Grand 2010 Tour, the plan is to cover south-east Asia: Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines — you get the idea. The more I think about it, I’m pretty sure South Korea and Japan (and China?) will have to wait for another trip. I could however hop down to New Zealand, stay there for a few weeks, and then over to Los Angeles (there’s a big ‘around America’ tour I’ve been thinking about for years, I’m just not sure when to do it!)

Anyway, Asia, after a little more research, is a lot more affluent than Africa — probably because of the secular, capitalistic powerhouses of Korea, Japan and Singapore. It’s a little rougher up on the mainland: if I go to Cambodia or Vietnam life is dirtier and more dangerous — but they have ELEPHANTS (so does Thailand, mind you… so I could probably just skip over potential-death-by-land-mine and head for the transsexuals of Bangkok.)

Re: Thailand, there probably isn’t much you don’t already know through the wonders of the modern media. It’s a melting pot of everything and anything, where east and west culture collides and something not wholly human emerges in the aftermath. Thailand appeals to my hedonistic streak because I get the feeling you can ‘find’ anything there: salvation and debauchery, food and drink — but also beautiful vistas and remnants of ancient civilisations. I guess it’s a ‘gateway’ country, much like Greece or Turkey — the multitudinous influences from every other culture in the vicinity have surely left their mark on Thailand.

For some reason (I’m going to research it more, but if anyone has the answer, let me know), the entirety of east Asia is really populated. Thailand with 63 million people has the same population as the UK, Vietnam has 85 million, the Philippines 92 million — and Indonesia has a stonking 231 million! At least Malaysia and Cambodia are fairly sparsely populated, so I’ll have a chance to spread my legs there. Is it simply because they’re really big countries? And I know less-developed nations tend to have more children for lots of reasons… maybe they grew big in the last 100 years, and now they’re slowing down as their ‘development index‘ increases? Oh, incidentally, Singapore is the third most-dense place in the world… more so than Hong Kong. It’s going to be a tight squeeze to get me in. 19,000 people per square mile, in Singapore — 12,000 per square mile in London, and 5,500 in urban New York City, by comparison. (They also speak Singlish in Singapore… which I am quite eager to hear! The other south-east Asia islands have similar pidgin languages right? Indo-English, Malay-English?)

Did you know that Russia has 11 time zones? And you thought scheduling in the US was hard! They go all the way from UTC+2 to UTC+12… which means Russia runs almost half the circumference of Earth… eep. Just threw that one in there, sorry. (Seriously, the amount of random shit in my head…)

It’s now time for this week’s ’site of photographic interest’, this week… Sumatra!

Sumatra

The first thing that caught my eye was the name: ‘Coffee!!’ Sumatra, along with Java (the main Indonesian island) are two of the most recognisable names when it comes to coffee. It’s no surprise tho’, considering all of the world’s coffee is grown within a narrow band around the equator — coffee beans come from trees that do best in hot-and-wet rainforests (and incidentally, the coffee infographic/comic by Oatmeal is very, very good).

So, it’s rainy, quite heavily forested and also right smack-bang on a fault line. The west ridge of the island is one long line of volcanoes! And there are elephants! (I’d really like to ride an elephant — I can’t think of a more apt mount for my gargantuan self.) Just look at this photo by Hank Hammatt (I don’t know who he is, but he takes nice photos it seems):

That’s Sumatra. I don’t even know how such a landscape is possible. It looks like a painting. God knows, really, but I want to find out!

* * *

Anyway, this week you get some totally unrelated photos. We had a light snow a few days ago which started to look really pretty when the sun eventually came out. They’re just assorted photos from around my garden and estate, and all using a 50mm lens in the hope of getting a little better at using it!

(In another photo you can see the number of rings… it was only about 60 or 70 years old. Quite young for a fallen tree!)

(I like the streaks of snow-free grass, from where sun has shone from between tall trees to the right)

(Look! A little… blob of snow!)

Now to brainstorm a disgusting story involving Vietcong rice-farmers and Japanese school girls…

Healthcare (or health care if you’re a colonial) means different things to different people. Depending on where you live, your background and your income, it might be synonymous with either insurance or the treatment of illness — and in some cases, it can even mean the public health of a nation or zone.

It’s important to think about these three things as separate entities: despite prevailing culture, you can’t mix up health insurance with the actual treatment of illness — they can both exist, but must be independent of each other. Health insurance, in countries without publicly-funded systems, is simply the way health care is paid for. In countries with ‘universal coverage’ like the UK, health insurance is used to pay for private care, or ‘complementary medicine’ (i.e. new/weird science). Public health is the overarching effort to improve health through improved knowledge and awareness, such as eating five portions of vegetables a day, ‘got milk?’, and so on.

Now, with that out of the way, let’s tuck in.

Healthcare is vital in the most true sense of the word. Without it we would die, immediately in a blaze of flame, or in a laboriously drawn-out fashion — it doesn’t matter: health care stops us from dying. Healthcare is so vital (there’s that word again) that about 10% of a Western nation’s GDP — 10% of its entire income — is spent on it. Some would argue that’s a small price to pay, for longevity of life. By comparison, most nations spend between 2 and 4% of their GDP on military/defence, and education comes in at about 5-7% of a nation’s GDP. So, as you can see, and have no doubt heard from Obama, health care is the biggest human issue.

But it’s all a damn mess; a horrible void of misunderstanding and overspending. And it all derives from a ‘knowledge gap’, between the doctor and the patient. The same can be said for most professions, but with healthcare the distance is most significant. Even if you don’t know the basic fundamentals of household plumbing, or how data traverses the Internet, you can still sleep soundly at night. But what if you’ve just been told you have cancer? Or that you’re being treated with Interferon beta-1a? You get a little jumpy, a little nervous — because you might die.

If we’ve learnt anything about the human body in the last 100 years, it’s that we should fear the inevitable onrush of death. Somewhere along the line we made the switch from ‘the most rugged and tenacious mammal on the planet’ to ‘wuss’. We used to live — and die. Now there are many more steps on the meter: alive, stressed, ill, broken, comatose, dead — and thousands more slotted in between.

Something doesn’t make sense. Why are we more afraid of our health now than 100 years ago? I’m not saying no one cared about death back then — people certainly put a lot of effort into making sure things were left tidy, and that the relevant gods would receive them into the afterlife — but it was just part of living. I think it has something to do with knowledge, and thus certainty and confidence. If you’re brought up with the knowledge that you will die by the age of 60 and you will die if you mistreat your body, that’s some stable knowledge that you can operate with. You can go out and live life.

What do we know about life and death today? Do you know how long you will live for, or if the quality of your life is assured? If I eat this burger, will it shorten my life — does that even matter? Should I be worried about senility, or will biotechnology/biopharmacy save me from that feckless fate?

It’s pretty weird to be confused about your own mortality, eh? A long, healthy life is the single most desirable wish — yet it is the one thing we are most uncertain about! I want to tie this in to the downfall of faith/belief and the rescinded promise of eternal (after)life, but I’m not sure I can yet — but it would make sense that, up until the last century, death was just been a temporary setback… but now it’s personal. (I kid, I kid, but you get the idea.)

To fix this problem, we need to close the gap between bleeding-edge research, the doctors, and us. We have to know more about our bodies and what they’re capable of; education obviously ties in at this point. I think we’re regularly reminded, and amazed, by what humans are capable of and how resilient we are — but at the same time, we have never been more aware of just how defenceless we ultimately are. Back then, we just died. No one knew why, we just died.

Now we die of cancer, heart disease, sclerosis, embolism — all invisible, all able to pounce at any time with little or no warning. But they’ve always been there, just like gravity or hydrogen. If we want to live long and healthy lives, we must teach about healthcare in schools. We must learn more about the body than the knee bone’s connection to the thigh bone, more than veins and arteries — like ancient Rome and Athens, education must be contemporary and hot on the heels of research.