Information has to do with in formation

It is a catchy phrase, painfully simple, infuriating to some people, and its semantic flow is tied to a handful of languages.

"Information has to do with in formation".

Linguistically, it works great in English and German, less great in French, although with a good accent from "le Midi", who knows?

We saw the phrase for the first time in a presentation of a long since retired professor, in a talk about a book he had just written on the role of trade unions in the now equally long retired Soviet Union.

The book was in another of the boxes mentioned in the previous post "Out of the box". The K-Landnews folks are as good at compartmentalizing information as the rest of us, so the box that had Stedman's Medical Dictionary contained more along those lines while the socio-political book of the scholar emeritus was in a box of heady political stuff.

The odd thing about the book on the place of trade unions in the Soviet power structure is that you could remove a few chapters and change the wording in what remains, and voila, you would have a reasonably well written book on the role of the large for-profit media and the semi-government TV and radio operations in modern Western countries.

Before you become defensive or offended by this train of thought, let us remind you that this is not about the political philosophy or ideology but about the mechanisms and schemes of exercising power in a "strong" state.

No matter the philosophy, the formation of power structures, there are striking similarities across all systems that rely on traditional hierarchical organization and rewards for adhering as well as punishment for dissent.

To make up for this decidedly not funny post, the next one will be titled "The wife on the whiteboard".