When I started building my customized WordPress theme some months ago, I decided to adopt ISO 8601 international standard for date and time representation. After having paused for many months, during these last few days I started again to work on the code and today afternoon I have finished it.

After having installed the new theme, I discovered that there was a problem. With PHP 5 you just need to use the letter ‘c’ as an argument for the date function and the date will be automatically formatted according to the ISO 8601 standard. Unfortunately even if on my PC I have installed PHP 5, I discovered on my provider’s server it is still running PHP 4…

I was in hurry so I found the first thing rapidly working: ‘r’ command, RFC 2822 format, that’s ok for that moment.

Having a little more time, this evening I have worked for few minutes in order to format manually the date and time following the ISO standard. The only problem was the difference between the GMT, the time at which I write posts and finally the time on the server!!!

I already knew that WordPress can modify the GMT time in order to adapt it to your time zone (under the ‘Options’ panel there is where to write how many hours must be added or subtracted), but today I discovered it is not able to regain that value when you print out the time stamp plus your time zone designator, instead of your setted value it gains the time zone of the server, in this case -06:00. However I live in Italy not in the State of Utah, so my time zone designator is +01:00 (or +02:00) and not -06:00.

Given this problem, and given also the fact that every year you have to change manually that value when it starts the daylight-saving period, I decided to revert to plain GMT, or better to the UTC. So from 2008-03-14T21:00:00Z on all posts will appear with a “Z” at their end. That letter stays for “Zulu Time” alias UTC, once were GMT…

Old posts will appear with a “+01:00″ string at their end. This means their time was set according to central Europe (Berlin, Rome, etc.) time zone. If I will have time I will write also a piece of code for the old posts written during the the daylight-saving periods.Done.

By ‘participating’ I mean that yesterday I went to vote. Why did I go? Because I think that parties have not to be destroyed but just reformed. I think that primary elections are a right mean, even if not the only one, for increasing the capability of the citizens to control their representatives, so I thought that punishing the only party which is currently keeping this kind of elections in Italy wasn’t a good idea.

Few weeks ago I went to sign the law of popular initiative proposed by Beppe Grillo, and I also explained here why I think his idea of creating a standard for civic lists seems to me a good idea. However I do not agreed with him when he wrote on October 10th that the yesterday primaries would have been the primaries of the dead bodies.

The main criticism pointed out by Grillo is that the winner of the primaries was already decided before the competition took place. Honestly we all knew it from the beginning, but this is not a sufficient reason for rejecting the whole system of parties together with primary elections. Primaries elections has just been introduced in Italy and it not all parties use them… only one party, the Democratic Party use them. So I think it is quite normal that they need time to become more efficient.

Lastly, one more remark. Grillo said he will not create a new party while he just set a standard for the civic lists that will be approved by him. However it is clear that he will at least root for them and saying they fit his standard he is in some way backing them. This put him in the middle of political battle field. When he was just a comedian his criticisms to the political class where part of his duties, because the satire has to be critical toward the power and the comedian being outside of the political field can fire against the faults of the political system. But Grillo is no more a mere comedian, he is a public political man. He is part of the game even if is playing it with his own style.

I have already talked about Beppe Grillo and his V-Day in the previous post on this blog. Few days ago Grillo has proposed to people that have backed his initiative to give life to civic lists, that are lists of independent candidates, for the upcoming local elections. Here you can find more details.

However what I found interesting is the idea of giving to those lists which will fulfil some specific requirements a kind of certification, Grillo talks about a “transparency certification”.

Many people speculated about what Grillo’s political movement would have become, among them someone guessed it would have become a new political party. However Grillo is giving the movement a quite different direction. Instead of creating the common structure of a party, which is in essence a hierarchical structure modelled on the base of armies even if tempered by liberal and democratic principles, Grillo is setting a standard.

Setting standards, I think we all know it, is not anything ludicrous. International credit rating agencies, such as Moody’s, Standard&Poors or Fitch, have an enormous power upon many States even without being States. Of course their power is not based on military force or investment assets, but on reputation. When someone fixes a standard and judges people or associations or goods basing on that standard, all their power lies in their reliability.

I have already stated that in my opinion policies are made of ends, means, choices and standards. Besides I have also already stated that policies can be distinguished from politics. However when someone wants to set a policy for a community they need politics, and politics are based on force, which can come from armies or money or public consensus.

Grillo now is going to set a standard based on his reputation. This standard in this sense is part of his policy, but it will also affect politics, because it is a standard that will affect consensus becoming in this way a means for getting an end, cleaning Italian politics, at least in what seems to be Grillo’s idea.

So we come back to the fact that it is difficult to separate definitely policies and politics: in the end politics can become means for setting some policies as standards, even if it often happens quite the opposite, that is policies used as flags just for seeking power, policies used as means for politics.

I have already stated my rule of keeping focused more on policies than politics and I also said that I do not aim to become a politician.

However I think that I have to try to do my best in order to improve the quality of the State I am a citizen of. This is why today I signed this petition.

In a representative democracy it is not possible to make a law without the Parliament, but it is difficult that a corrupted political system will be able to reform itself without any pressure from outside. This is why even if the v-day initiative had a populist flavour it was anyway something worth to be endorsed.

The first step seems to generate some pressure, some demand from outside. Of course also lobbies or terrorists try to do that in order to influence politicians and gain directly or indirectly any power, but the difference is that a democratic pressure from the civil society is a non-violent and public demand. Public demonstrations are one way of creating such a kind of pressure, but politicians have already become insensitive to them.

Popular initiatives can be an other mean, let’s see if an effective one, but they need to be followed by some kind of support towards those groups of politicians who will be ready to back popular demands inside the Parliament.

I am an admirer of the common law system. Even if I am not an expert on this field, it seems to me that the common law system is far more efficient than the civil law one. I think this is because it is impossible that the legislator will be able to think all the possible cases which can occur from its abstract point of view and before the law has been put into practice. The possibility of “refining” a law according it to concrete cases seems to me a very powerful tool in order to improve the efficiency of the whole legal system and so of the whole socio-economical system.

Besides I often read comments of British people against EU in many blogs. One of the reason why these people are against EU is its civil law system. The conclusion they derive from this points (even if not only from it) is that the UK has to move away from the EU. I have already stated somewhere that I am supportive of the idea that UK citizens would be allowed to vote if they want or not to remain in the EU. But this is not my focus in this piece of blog.

My point here is that it would be better for EU as EU to adopt a common law system, even in the case one day the UK would leave us. I will also advocate the adoption of the common law system in my own country, Italy.

Anyway if the UK will remain in the EU and they will lead a battle for reforming EU in order to base it on a common law system, I will be supportive of such a campaign.

Jan Seifert, president of Young European Federalist, wrote a post some days ago demanding that the European political families will present their candidates for the Commission President before the elections of the European Parliament in 2009.

I totally agree with him and I suggest, as I commented in his blog, that European Political families will choose their candidates through the mean of primary elections, these will really boost the process of democratization of EU institutions.

I have already stated here and here why I think we, Europeans, already live in a federal State at least since 1992. However till now nobody has clearly stated this and nobody has let people rightly express on this. Even if in the past there were many occasions to vote, and in many States there were also referenda about the treaties, it has been never clearly stated what was really going on. So I think it is time to let people have a vote on it. Let’s see how.

1. The new Treaty has to be called with its real name “Constitution” and people has to be correctly informed that EU is already a federal State (even if someone says that the idea of a federal State is out fashioned , changing the name will not change the substance, so it is better to tell things as they are).
2. People have to be asked if they want the new treaty or not using the mean of the referendum
3. All EU countries have to organize the referendum in the same day
4. If the majority of the citizens of the EU taken as a whole will vote yes the new treaty will become active in the whole EU, else the treaty will be rewrite and people asked again.
5. If the condition at point 4 has been fulfilled (the majority of the citizens of the EU taken as a whole voted yes) and so the treaty has become effective in the whole EU territory, and if there are some countries whose citizens mostly voted “no”, then those countries will take an other referendum asking explicitly to their citizens if they want to remain inside the EU and so be compelled to accept the new treaty, or to part from EU.

Starting from the distinction I made among policies and politics, I feel to say that I am more interested in policies than politics, and I will try to focus this blog on policies, even if policies and politics are often intertwined.

At present my idea is that we can describe policies as a set of ends, means, choices and standards. I am not sure this set to be complete, and I am not sure even if it is not redundant… but I will try to use it as a first step toward further reflections.