Some of these links are broken, because I have restructured the workbook. I’m not going to fix them here, please just use the main Table of Contents

My last entry started with “Once again, my blog entry needs to start with excuses for not having written anything for months, this time because of the illness of at least one household member, which hasn’t really left enough time for sleep, let alone personal time during which I was alert enough to write.”

It did not abate as I hoped. A family and household memger died, after a few days in pain in hospital.

However, I feel I need something to do that is not just household problems.

I have just posted two workshops which are the beginning of a series on countries ― sovereign states ― which use the tools outlined earlier. The first is a brief explanation on why there is reason for doubt as to why countries are a good thing at all. The second is the foundation for understanding countries as systems. I started by using the generic framework for describing systems that I outlined in my social systems introduction I was happy to find that the concepts I had introduced worked reasonably well and raised some questions I hadn’t thought of before.

I didn’t have to change the social systems introduction, except that I spotted a few typos as I worked through it. So the introduction plus this new workshop serve as a validation (so far).

This workshop on countries is still generic ― a model of a generic country which is step in between the generic properties of social systems and the analysis of a particular country. The next few workshops will continue at this middle level by looking at the relationships identified in this workshop.