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I'm sure it could be so construed. Buying small vials of an oil like substance from Palestinian Arabs.

Try it. It's great stuff. And if you're so inclined you can also ponder whether any of the trees listened in to the sermon on the mount, or something.

Clearly not one for your hand-luggage though.

Why?

Is the internet not the twentieth century's greatest example of "voluntary co-operation"? At least the late twnetieth century anyway. Why do we need "governance". It can be a beautiful thing. Like the lack of planning policy that went into Edinburgh's New Town?

Yes, there are examples, pretty egregious ones at that, of countries where human rights are not respected anyway further attacking peoples' rights for speaking out on the internet, or restricting their access, but one of the beauties (if we exclude the gazillions of spam email messages and viruses) is that it has provided an infrastructure that has been used time and again by clever people - for good and bad - to get round attempts to limit what they can do.

But if we try to tame the internet, and to extend some kind of official governance to it, aren't we officially entrenching the idea that it's there to be governed, for governments to interfere in?

My theory is that this forum is more about our governments. They are shit scared that the potential for the internet to bring about person to person interconnectivity, allowing people to organize in groups other than the geographical territories they manage, will bring about their irrelevance.

Should we also be worried about the corporate "colonization" of the internet that has gathered pace over the past five years or so? Well, yes and no. Actually, for most traditional corporations using the internet it's not about pushing the small guy out, but competing with them like they never have had to previously in a medium in which the little guy, more flexible and quicker to change, has a head start on. Pound for pound spent on it I'm sure small businesses are "better" at the internet and getting better all the time. And the internet could be the best way of levelling the playing field, democratising capitalism.

It is surely the very fact that the internet is not governed by nation states - that it is still a "land" of pioneering sprits pushing the boundaries - of trade, of communication, of knowledge transfer - that gives it its strength. And that's what scares those who would rule us.

Leave it alone! It has more power to break those regimes that abuse us than any supranational body that's incapable of preventing some of its member governments doing just what they please anyway.

A little piece in a well researched blog on house prices around the world I keep an eye on:

Fighting over their castles:

"OF ALL the forces that have changed Britain over the past decade or so, the long bull market in housing is perhaps the strongest—and the most anonymous. High house prices have done their work quietly, reshaping concentrations of wealth and stoking clashes over supply. Other rich countries have had house-price booms too, but Britain's has been faster and more furious (see chart). And high levels of home ownership (Britons are more likely to own bricks than even Americans but less likely to own equities) have magnified their effect."

"Generational Equity" features highly too. Read it all here.