I am enjoying my new copy of the land magazine!

What is harder to perceive is that the same forces still operate in our society (and in all societies as far as I know). In the west we may consider ourselves to be free – we are free to chose where we live, and what employment we take, for example. However, we are not free to chose whether we participate in this system.

Yes you can chose what house you live in, and whether to rent it or buy it, but you cannot make a housing choice that doesn’t require you to service it with large monthly sums of money, which also enslaves you to a job. Yes, you can chose who you work for, but you cannot chose not to work at all.

The trick of the capitalist system is to remove a figurehead from the position of “master”. None of us are slaves to another person directly, we are slaves to a system. This illusion of freedom keeps those who are enslaved under control much more effectively than a system where the enslaved are aware of their slavery. The illusion of freedom keeps the slaves in subservience.

True freedom is free access to the resources necessary for life: water, food, and shelter; in short access to land. It is with access to these resources and the freedom to use them, that one can provide for the basics of life. If one can provide for these needs, then one is no longer required to work for shelter, or food.

Access to land is kept out of the grasp of ordinary working people for this very reason. In the UK this is what the planning system is designed to do – yes farm land itself is not vastly expensive, but access to this land to provide for the basic needs of life is prohibited – homes are required to be sited on building land for example.

The rights of ordinary people to provide for themselves from the natural resources around them have been taken away, thus enslaving them to a system which is designed to generate more wealth for the wealthy.

None is more enslaved than the slave who believes himself to be free

A roe deer in the woods today. I see these most times I go into the woods next to our house. My mother says she never sees them but I guess she is just too noisy.

Roe deer rut in the summer but the embryo doesn’t implant until around this time of year, to delay the birth until the summer months when food is plentiful.

This is a good time of year to see deer as there isn’t as much cover.

This is scary. The top two people of the Metropolitan police force have just quit over this scandal; how can we believe a word the police say, especially when phrases like this make absolutely no sense.

The timing of Sean Hoare’s death is clearly suspicious – could it have come at a better time for News International? (Well clearly yes, last week would have been preferable, but you know what I mean). How can the police, unable to provide any explanation for the death of a man in his mid 40s in his own home, say that it’s not suspicious?

I have no idea how or why Sean Hoare is dead, but I can safely say that I am definitely suspicious…

p img {margin: 0 auto;}

but also no. Images are inline elements so they don’t understand the margin. However this will fix that:

p img {display:block;margin: 0 auto;}

Hope this helps someone!

input[type=submit]{display:none;}

This is targeting the sign up button on an email subscription form. Not every browser will understand this, so IE6 for example will just ignore it. For my purposes this is fine. My logic is that people on IE6 probably need the submit button anyway, whereas those who use more modern browsers which will understand this declaration will also be familiar with the fact that hitting enter will submit their form. An unusual approach to progressive enhancement maybe, but it made me happy…

If you have ever done much work embedding flash onto a website you will have come across the wmode parameter. If you set wmode=”transparent” then the swf file you include will behave properly and obey your stacking (z-index) commands.

Today I discovered that this parameter also allows you to apply CSS3 border-radius to a container of a flash movie – if your swf takes the same amount of space as its container, then if you apply a border radius to the container if will also crop the swf.

I couldn’t find that documented anywhere, so I hope it helps someone.

This got me thinking – I thought that same thing could be achieved in CSS, without any javascript, so I gave it ago. This was the best I could do:

http://scruffian.com/css3fun/ [will only work on the latest version of Safari on Snow Leopard].

It’s pretty similar – a few differences, but close enough. The nice thing about this is that it doesn’t use any images or javascript – it’s just pure CSS!

It’s quite amazing what you can achieve with CSS, of course at the moment this is only in bleeding edge browsers, but hopefully this stuff will be standardised. I also made a couple of other interesting variations:

bubbles | planets

So excited…

Now they need to make it so I can add my own labels! Enjoy…