ecopolis

Don’t worry, Be happy. According to David Wong the work which led to the discovery of fluoxetine (aka Prozac) began at Eli Lilly in 1970 as a collaboration between Bryan Molloy and Robert Rathburn. It was known at that time that antihistamine diphenhydramine shows some antidepressant-like properties. Testing the physiological effects of these compounds at least 27 deaths had been linked to Prozac’s use before the drug was released. One of the documents shows that as of October 15, 1987, two months before Prozac was allowed on the market, there had already been 15 suicides linked to it – six by overdose, four by gunshot, three by hanging and two by drowning.

http://www.pnc.com.au/~cafmr/newsl/prozac.html

Don’t worry, Be happy. Despite the startling information about these 27 fatalities – FDA officials failed to prevent Prozac from being released. PROZAC was initially approved for treatment of depression in Belgium in 1986 and on December 29, 1987 in the United States. Since then, it has been approved and marketed in more than 90 countries and used by more than 54 million people worldwide. Lethal happiness in a Pro-zac : easy to marketed and easy to swallow for the (synthetic) generation of pills (weight loss, contraceptive, ecstasy, sleeping up to viagra pills). The most widely used antidepressant in history, prescribed to 54m people worldwide for depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, eating disorders and premenstrual dysphoric disorder.

A kind of new D/R – epressive Democracy based on Serotonin treatement for everybody: men, women, children and animals. Cats and dogs may suffer from stress. For them the stress is called: HUMANS. and Twenty years on Prozac?

LAST BUT NOT LEAST:
in the last days AIFA just approved treating kids with Prozac Fluoxetina (PROZAC®)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Don’t Worry, Be Happy” is the title and famous principal lyric of a song by popular musician Bobby McFerrin, the first a cappella song to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, holding that position for two weeks in September of 1988. At the 1989 Grammy Awards, “Don’t Worry Be Happy” won ‘Best Song of the Year’. The song’s title is taken from a famous quote by Meher Baba.

Not even a word on the italian papers and media agency, and as you can see not a word on the main italians web news editors and press agency:
ANSA- italian press agency
la Repubblica – left wing paper
il Giornale – right wing paper

I founded an article just on the website of the paper l’Unità.
It seems quite a big news, at least to me: last 29 of april, just on the papers of the local edition of a national newspapers appears the news of the journalist Massimo Calandri: the day before it was issued the first condamn to the Minister of Internal Affair for invalidity and moral injury to Marina Spaccini. Pediatrics and catholic pacific activist, she was hardly beated by police at G8 in Genova, while she was all weared all white (police was looking ufficially for the “black block”) and while she had the hands up.

The State has to indemnify only 5.000 euros to Marina Spaccini, but the point is that because it wasn’t possible to identify the police agent that beated her, the judge Angela Latella condamned the Minister of Internal Affair.

Not even a word on the italian papers and media agency….

FEMME POLITIQUE
Today I would like to remember one of the most significative “femme politique” ever: Olympe de Gouges.
In 1789, in the French Revolution, French citizenship was defined in the document, Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. From 1789 until 1944, French citizenship was limited to males — even though women were active in the French Revolution, and many assumed that citizenship was theirs by right of their active participation in that historic liberation battle.

Olympe de Gouges in 1791 wrote and published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen (Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne). Modeled on the 1789 Declaration of the National Assembly, defining citizenship for men, this Declaration echoed the same language and extended it to women, as well.

Olympe de Gouges both asserted woman’s capability to reason and make moral decisions, and pointed to the feminine virtues of emotion and feeling. Woman was not simply the same as man, but she was his equal partner. She was guillotined in 1793 as a reactionary royalist.

The Rights of Women 1791 :
http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/book-sum/gouges.html
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympe_de_Gouges

Dmytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick wroted a really interesting article about the real impact of Web 2.0, where what shines is not always gold…

Here some excerpt from that text that you can find here.

The hype surrounding Web 2.0’s ability to democratise content production obscures its centralisation of ownership and the means of sharing. Dmytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick expose Web 2.0 as a venture capitalist’s paradise where investors pocket the value produced by unpaid users, ride on the technical innovations of the free software movement and kill off the decentralising potential of peer-to-peer production.

Tim Berners-Lee is correct. There is nothing from a technical or user point of view in Web 2.0 which does not have its roots in, and is not a natural development from, Web 1.0. The technology associated with the Web 2.0 banner was possible and in some cases readily available before, but the hype surrounding this usage has certainly affected the growth of Web 2.0 internet sites.

The internet (which is more than the web, actually) has always been about sharing between users. In fact, Usenet, a distributed messaging system, has been operating since 1979! Since long before even Web 1.0, Usenet has been hosting discussions, ‘amateur’ journalism, and enabling photo and file sharing. Like the internet, it is a distributed system not owned or controlled by anyone. It is this quality, a lack of central ownership and control, that differentiate services such as Usenet from Web 2.0.

[...]

If Web 2.0 means anything at all, its meaning lies in the rationale of venture capital. Web 2.0 represents the return of investment in internet startups. After the dotcom bust (the real end of Web 1.0) those wooing investment dollars needed a new rationale for investing in online ventures. ‘Build it and they will come’, the dominant attitude of the ’90s dotcom boom, along with the delusional ‘new economy’, was no longer attractive after so many online ventures failed. Building infrastructure and financing real capitalisation was no longer what investors were looking for. Capturing value created by others, however, proved to be a more attractive proposition.

[...]

The value produced by users of Web 2.0 services such as YouTube is captured by capitalist investors. In some cases, the actual content they contribute winds up the property of site owners. Private appropriation of community created value is a betrayal of the promise of sharing technology and free cooperation.

[...]

The lack of central infrastructure also comes with a lack of central control, meaning that censorship, often a problem with privately-owned ‘communities’ that frequently bend to private and public pressure groups and enforce limitations on the the kinds of content they allow. Also, the lack of large central cross-referencing databases of user information has a strong advantage in terms of privacy.

From this perspective, it can be said that Web 2.0 is capitalism’s preemptive attack against P2P systems.

[...]

Capitalism, rooted in the idea of earning income by way of idle share ownership, requires centralised control, without which peer producers have no reason to share their income with outside shareholders. Capitalism, therefore, is incompatible with free P2P networks, and thus, so long as the financing of internet development comes from private shareholders looking to capture value by owning internet resources, the network will only become more restricted and centralised.

[...]

Thus Web 2.0 is not to be thought of as a second-generation of either the technical or social development of the internet, but rather as the second wave of capitalist enclosure of the Information Commons.

Virtually all of the most used internet resources could be replaced by P2P alternatives.