We don't know of any damn foreign countries, we are just the State Department!

Found this gem on the webpage of the US embassy in Finland. Not their fault, it's the whole State-Department-wide:

"Importance notice (February 6, 2019):
Please note: You cannot currently list a “Country” when completing the “Emergency Contact” section on our form filler applications available through Travel.State.Gov (DS-11 and DS-82). Please list an emergency contact in the United States."

For those who don't know, DS-11 and DS-82 are US passport application forms. And they include information on an emergency contact. Without a country, because the damn forms don't have a field for a country.

For fuck's sake! This is our State motherfucking Department. They should fucking know that there are such things as foreign countries, and that addresses should include a fucking field for a fucking country. This is our foreign ministry, meant to conduct our international relations (the ones that don't involve drones, anyway), to run embassies, to provide services to Americans travelling or living abroad and they are either a) not capable of adding a field to a form, or b) not capable of sending an international snail mail if there is a field for the country.

Incidentally, there is no field for email there, either. The form does not predate email, though, because there is an email field for the applicant, just not for the emergency contact. Because snail mail is just what you want to use when you want to contact someone in an emergency. There is a field for a phone number, thank God for small favors. With luck you should be able to fit the country code in there.

The embassy encourages (but does not require anymore, luckily) everyone who can apply for a passport by mail (that's everyone over 16 whose previous passport still exists and is less than 15 years old) to do so.  There is only one unfortunate detail: you have to pay for it in person. Dollars, euros or a major credit card. Well, since I live in Helsinki that beats pankkivekseli that I had to procure the last time around (don't ask me what it is - some Finnish version of a money order - I've never heard of them before, or since.)

Well, it's still a couple of years before I need to renew my passport, so there is some hope that the embassy might get themselves a bank account or something, or figure out the local banking system. They already have an online banking transfer set up for visa applicants, so maybe, just maybe, in a couple of years they'll figure out how to do it for the citizens. OTOH, I was asking the same questions the last time, so probably not.

The war on opiates and constipation

Every time a war against anything starts in the US, the warriors are very annoyingly efficient. Last year I just wanted a little plastic bag for my purchases in a pharmacy in Harvard Square. I asked the cashier for a plastic bag, and he looked at me with huge round eyes and open mouth, as if I had asked him for newborn baby brains sprinkled with cocaine. Then he looked around, as if trying to make sure that nobody heard us, and whispered: "Don't you know? Plastic bags are forbidden!" I told him that I live in Helsinki, Finland, and the news of the city of Cambridge forbidding the plastic bags hadn't quite made the front page there. This seemed to surprise him.

But yes, they are forbidden now. Mind you, not taxed, or sold for money (unless you want to buy a pack of 100 or so; unless they already got to those as well), or something like that. Forbidden. The paper bag was utterly unusable for my purposes so I made do sticking the stuff in various pockets of my jeans and purse, and buggered off, wondering what they are gonna ban next.

I guess we found it now: Loperamide, aka Imodium. As a part of general struggle against the opiate addiction. Because some people apparently use it as a drug, in the amounts of 100 times the recommended dose. (As an aside: I have taken the drug in question once in my life, half a pill, and didn't shit for a week after that. Do the people who take 100 pills at a time shit at all, ever again?)

Anyway, now the FDA is asking the manufacturers to discontinue selling the big packages, and the people with chronic diarrhea are screwed. Paska juttu.

We, Joe III, don't feel like getting emails from our subjects

Decided to contact my House Representative, Joe Kennedy. Haven't even written the actual email yet, but decided to find the contact info anyway.

Found it. The first thing it says:

"Regrettably, I am unable to reply to any email from constituents outside of the district. Please enter your zip code to verify residency and go to the next step:"

Several questions:

1. Does the guy mean that he only accepts email from his own constituents (I thought the word "constituent" already implied that), that he only accepts email from his constituents who really reside in his district, or only from his constituents who happen to be in his district physically at the moment?

2. Considering that nobody has ever demanded a 9-digit zip code from me before, why do I have to supply it just in order to be given my representative's email address?

3. Has the guy ever heard of an ancient technique called lying?

Maybe I am overreacting, but somehow I get a feeling that addressing this guy with an expat issue will be like talking to a wall.

People, including expats, should know their heroes.

Charles Rangel, D-NY, one of the two cosponsors of the FATCA bill.

That's the man most concerned about Americans living and/or banking abroad and not paying taxes. Well, I am glad that for once a politician is legislating on something he is an expert on.

A few years ago the man got caught renting 4 adjacent rent-stabilized apartments in Manhattan. Those are meant to be primary residences, preferably for people of limited means. I don't know how he ever explained his burning need for having 4 primary residences.

At the same time he filed a homestead tax break on his house in DC. AFAIK these are also meant for primary residences.

In 2008 Rangel totally forgot to mention his rental income from an overseas villa to IRS. Oops. Got caught.

Another thing he forgot was to disclose half of his assets and a bit of his income to Congress.

Property taxes on a couple of his New Jersey properties also got forgotten. Shit happens, you know.

A bit later he happened to violate the House gift rules by accepting trips to the Caribbean.

The ethics trial of the House ethics committee found him guilty in 11 out of the 13 original charges.

And yes, all of the above happened just after, just before, and right during the time when he was cosponsoring the bill that would interfere with the banking of several million Americans so severely that many of them would be abandoned by their banks, just to make sure that they are not hiding something.

A question to New Yorkers: why is this ape still in Congress? Seriously, even among the candidates there must be somebody with more sense and fewer ethics violation.

Important information for Jews

"The offering, sale and/or distribution of many of the products or services described on this website are not intended to any Jews. If you intend to obtain any product or service from OurBank that is described on this web site, you must first inform OurBank whether you are a Jew.

This website and its respective contents do not constitute an offer or invitation to purchase or subscribe for any securities or a solicitation of any offer to sell any securities to Jews. Any brokerage and investment advisory services described herein are not intended for Jews. Furthermore, any solicitation on this web site of banking services (including accepting and/or soliciting deposits), insurance services, mortgage and/or consumer lending services or credit card services is not intended for Jews..."

That's what I just got from my bank. No, the word is not "Jews", but it describes a population group to which I belong. The only reason I withheld the name of the bank is that many banks are displaying the same text, and they have not written it themselves. The word is "US persons", and the guilty parties in this case are the Senate and the House, with the special honorary mentions for  Max Baucus (D–Montana) and Charles Rangel (D–NY), the authors of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act of 2009.

(US persons is defined as all US citizens and permanent residents resident in the US, some US citizens resident abroad - they are not saying who, and whether this actually applies to me, and any entity organized or incorporated under the laws of the United States).

This particular law has raised the US citizenship renunciations by a factor of six, which should say something to our Congress, or would have if it weren't, as an old joke says, the opposite of progress.

I am certainly not planning to renounce mine. Seriously, I'd rather vote for Mr. Rangel with a very big cactus, applied anally. But the first thing that comes to mind is banning the population register from identifying me as a US person to anyone, and lying to all the Finnish (and other non-American) financial institutions that I ever deal with that I am not in fact a US person. Funny thing - so far I have always been in compliance with all the US tax laws. Will there be a day when I choose not to report an account just because doing so would "out" me as an American to the bank that holds the account, and cause them to close that account? If that day comes, I will totally do that without feeling guilty in the least.

Allies who listen to each other

In a 2008 speech in Berlin Obama told Germans that allies should listen to each other. Well, I am glad that at least some of our politicians keep at least some of their campaign promises. Although, judging from the Germans' reaction, I don't suppose they'd realized that he meant it that literally.

 Now the media is speculating whether or not Obama knew about the surveillance, and the White House is not admitting anything either way. I can sort of understand them. "I didn't inhale" sounds kind of stupid, and "I did inhale" is somewhat embarrassing.

 What are the implications of Obama not knowing about the surveillance (which, IMO, is about as likely as Clinton not knowing about what Monica Lewinski was doing with his dick)? Either the man is (possibly intentionally) stupid and doesn't know where his surveillance data comes from, or he just doesn't care, or the NSA is doing whatever it wants and doesn't inform the president at all, or share the surveillance data with him. None of that sounds particularly good.

Back from the US

Back from Florida and Boston and NYC. Should really visit there more often. Yes, even Florida.

For the first time ever didn't go anywhere at all in Boston, just spent my time seeing people, and still didn't see everybody I wanted to see.

This was my first time in Florida, and it was quite lovely, much better than expected. They have sandy beaches, and warm sea, and little lizards, and iguanas, and weird-looking turtles, and weird-looking birds, and flying fish.

Like almost any American I occasionally have some grievances against the federal government, but I could never imagine that I'd add "they hid all the crocodiles and alligators in Florida" to the list. But they did. We didn't get to visit Everglades or see any crocodiles at all.

Realized I actually like beaches quite a lot as long as there is no hot yellow thing in the sky.

Wish I could have taken some pictures of the flying fish, but they absolutely refused to pose in midair.

Some random thoughts on the Snowden scandal

1. Yeah, governments spy on each other, including their own allies. Everyone knows that. When you get caught doing that, the thing to do is to look sheepish and apologize, not to make a huge scandal and create one diplomatic incident after another chasing the whistleblower around the world.

2. We have this thing called the Constitution. Also the Fourth Amendment. The current administration should read it sometime, and so should the Congress. It does not say "the Federal Government should read everyone's mail and eavesdrop on everything that moves".

3. Yep, terrorists. I am all for catching terrorists. Other evildoers, too. That's what we have warrants for, and probable cause. "Uses Gmail" does not constitute a probable cause. While you are at it, you might consider more efficient methods of catching terrorists - for example listening when a foreign government or their own parents warn you about them.

4. I understand there are minimization procedures in place, where NSA only collects the data, and only uses it under very strict rules, so for the most part the data just sits there safe and unused. Hmm... Safe... Didn't NSA just have its own secrets leaked all over the Internet? How safe do you think are yours?

5. It's damn hard to keep secrets nowadays when any fucker with a USB drive and a security clearance can publish them on the Internet.

6. The above concerns both the NSA et.al., and the people's data they collect.

7. That's a lot of data, BTW. How many people do they give the security clearance to in order to deal with it? How well do they check them? How many wannabe terrorists are actually on the NSA payroll?

8. It appears that what Snowden has done was illegal, and what the NSA has done is only of questionable legality. Nevertheless chasing the whistleblower all over the world in embarrassing ways only works to convince the observers that the whistle needed to be blown. And yes, it did.

9. One thing that I've been wondering about since the original Wikileaks scandal: how easy is it to add fake data to any such revelation? Especially if you add it to a mountain of real data?

Change we can sure as hell believe in

"Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process."

From Obama's pre-inaguration ethics agenda.

I think the ethics have changed just a bit.

Things change

I remember when my friend Anna got up and argued for slavery, or rather for the northern states allowing the southern states to continue with it. She made a very good and convincing argument, too, as much as one can be made on the subject, mostly based on property rights and the rights of states. A guy named Reza argued for stopping the slavery, using the arguments that are more familiar to us, and was also quite convincing. Then they switched positions, and were quite as good arguing for the opposite side.

This whole thing was very new to me (I had been out of USSR for several months), and I was not any good in arguing for the things I don't believe in (I think I could do a much better job now but am still not as good as Anna and Reza were back then), and I got a C for the class and didn't enjoy it much, but I did learn quite a lot.

We've done a lot of uncontroversial topics like that. I think the only reason we didn't do Holocaust was that this was a US history class, and we only did the debates where both parties were American.

It appears that similar assignments are national news nowadays.

An open letter to IRS

Dear IRS,

I do hereby solemnly swear that I don't file my federal taxes for fun and personal entertainment, but because you require me to. If you would like to change your mind and stop requiring tax returns from people whose total income is 0, adjusted gross income is 0, and taxes or refunds owed are 0, please do so, it would be most welcome. Until then - please adjust your processing software to be able to process the forms where these values are 0.


Also, please do not ask people to put things in parentheses if your forms don't accept parentheses.

Checkboxes that cannot be unchecked are not a nice touch, either.

Naked guy demonstration in San Francisco

I've seen a number of naked guys in my life, but this is the first time I'd seen one in a hat. I think hats look pretty stylish in the absence of other clothes.

When I went there to take pictures I was embarrassingly aware of having the smallest camera in the crowd.

I still ain't dead

It's been a while, I know. All kind of life has been happening to me, including Android, Pacific ocean, bear country, canyons, fucking huge trees ("fucking" is an adverb here, not a verb, in case you are wondering), San Francisco, mysterious mists, Hearst Castle, Boston, seals, relatives, whiskey, Numb3rs, the latest Pratchett and the newest Ubuntu.

I didn't even have time and evergy to say something snarky about the natural death of Anwar al-Awlaki and the trial of his disciple, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. I am all out of snark at the moment. Seriously, when the guy sets his balls on fire in pursuit of 72 virgins, what can you possibly say to top that? I guess al-Awlaki neglected to inform him that the 72 virgins in question are in fact the bearded men currently in detention in Colorado Supermax.

Anyway, here is my "what I did on vacation":

- Spent 21 days in the US.
- Saw 16 relatives. This was overwhelming but nice, because somehow we forgot to inform the one really obnoxious relative of our arrival. I sincerely hope she doesn't read this.
- Saw an apple dog in an Chicago airport. I shit you not: they had a dog sniffing out apples and a customs officer with a huge bag confiscating them from evildoers. Hope the customs officers baked themselves a huge apple pie.
- Took a lot of pictures. All of them here.
- Realized that the altitude of 2 kilometers and a sinus infection do not combine well.
- Drove all over the bear country and didn't see a single bear. Which is good, because I'd have to wash my pants afterwards. Saw quite a lot of deer, blue birds, seals, and a couple of zebras.
- Saw a demonstration of naked men in San Francisco.

Some observations:

- The Pacific ocean is big, cold and wet. I am totally sticking with Atlantic for any beach vacations. Or at least the Asian side of the Pacific.
- There are seals everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Check out my pictures from the Santa Cruz wharf. They also had a critter that looked a bit like a pterodactyl, but hopefully wasn't.
- Californians keep their clouds on the sea and on the ground, instead of letting them float in the sky like normal people.
- Daly City is a mysterous cold place where visibility is always zero and the sun never shines and there is thick fog everywhere. I think Cthulhu lives there right near the Hellmouth or something...
- Pluot is a good, good fruit, and I want them here.
- Sequoias are pretty big. In fact all the other trees in sequoia forests are huge too.
- San Joaquin valley is poor, desolate, dried-out and full of posters saying whom they are gonna vote out of office during the next election. Pelosi, Boxer and Costa are the "favorites". Except that Pelosi isn't in their district.
- Tioga road in Yosemite turned out to be a most interesting place, even though at first it didn't look that way.

A modest proposal

This has been inspired by the WikiLeaks scandal and the politician comments on it:

It has never seemed unfair to me that the prospective new citizens in some countries - for example the US - have to take tests in order to get the citizenship, whereas a lot of native-born citizens could not pass the same test. For the native-born the citizenship is a birthright, whereas the people who want to acquire the rights of citizenship can be asked to prove that they know at least something about the new country. Fair enough.

But could we please, please start administering the same test to our elected representatives? In the House, the Senate and the White House? Being a House Representative, a Senator or a President is not a birthright in the same way as citizenship is; there are residency requirements, age requirements, etc. So couldn't we demand that every motherfucker who is sworn into office and solemnly swears to defend the Constitution of the United States proves that he or she has actually read the damn thing? Is that too fucking much to ask?

Well, of course it is. It would require a new amendment to the Constitution. No way two thirds of both houses and three fourths of state legislatures are gonna ratify any amendment that would require our elected officials to be able to read.

The white minority in the US

Herja has asked whether or not white Americans are concerned about being or being about to become a minority. The answer is: as far as I can see, they aren't.

The thing is, white Americans are not a minority, nor are about to become one anytime soon. They are about 75% of population, and are projected to drop slightly by 2042. The projection says that by 2042 the non-Hispanic whites will drop under 50% of the total population, but "non-Hispanic whites" are a rather artificial category.

To put it really bluntly, whites are usually concerned about blacks (more specifically about not being a minority anywhere where blacks are a majority) and the black population is not rising in any significant numbers. The Asian population is rising really fast, but I've never met anyone who'd be concerned about that. Lots of people are concerned about Hispanic immigration in the sense of it being a lot of poorly educated people who don't speak English; very few people regard English-speaking US-educated Hispanics as any kind of a threat.

I am back!

I was on vacation, mostly in Paris and Rome. From Paris I went for a day trip to Chartres, which had an amazing cathedral, and now I am vaguely wondering how come we haven't visited the cathedrals in Rouen and Amiens and many other places.

Now I am celebrating the victory in the US elections. The victory consists of the Republicans getting the majority in the House. I am really uncomfortable with either party having the House, the Senate and the White House at the same time, and now it's over for the Democrats this time round.

Helsingin Sanomat had a lot of people commenting about how Americans are stupid and have voted totally wrong. For some reason it makes me giggle.

Who are those people?

President Obama has ordered the Health and Human Services agency to ensure that the hospitals that get Medicare and Medicaid money grant visitation right to whoever the patient wants. It was mostly described in the news as giving the visitation rights to same-sex partners, but it fact it concerns all the people who wish to be visited by someone who is not a member of their immediate family.

This is very good news, of course, but the very fact that the issue exists makes me wonder quite a bit - who are the enemy, I mean the people on the other side of the issue? Why? I've never seen them. This sort of gives me the feeling that there is some other, alternative USA out there.

Obviously, one of the guilty parties is Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital. A few years ago a woman visiting Miami got a brain aneurysm and was rushed there. When her partner of 17 years came there with their three children, they were not allowed to visit the woman, in spite of the fact that the partner had a medical power of attorney document with her, and in spite of the fact that there was no medical reason to prevent the visit. The woman died, alone.

Jackson Memorial Hospital argued in court - successfully, no less - that they are under no obligation to allow any visitors at all. I can only hope that everyone who does have an opportunity to choose their hospital has heard this loud and clear.

The whole thing makes me suspect that Miami Jackson Memorial Hospital is in fact run by aliens (of the extraterrestrial kind) with little green antennae, who did not come in peace. Seriously, I've never seen anything like that. I've never seen any hospital in the US (or in Finland or Austria, for that matter) take any interest in who their patient's visitors are. Moreover - I know that there are many Americans who are different from me in one way or another, and I've met quite a lot of them, from rather far right to rather far left, from the coasts and from the Midwest, religious and atheists, but I've never met a person whom I could even imagine supporting this idea. Who are they? Hey, if any of you are reading this, wanna tell me who you are?

I can imagine that if some hospital in Boston suddenly started admitting only immediate relatives to visit patients, the result would be immediate violence, with the perpetrator utterly failing to be convicted by the jury of his or her peers.

What's in it for the hospitals? Also, how do they even know who the immediate family are? How does anyone know that I am my parents' daughter, or my parents are married to each other? Obviously, if the matter comes up in some court, one can unearth some certificates, my parents have their wedding pictures somewhere, and quite a lot of living witnesses to the event, and the fact that they are my parents can be established by a DNA test. Anybody who does not have the time and money for all of the above would have to rely on our word, though.

Alabama on the forefront of high-school BDSM

Oxford High School in Oxford, Alabama, has a dress code for prom dresses: the hem cannot be more than 6 inches above the knee and the cleavage cannot be below the breastbone. The article is not clear on whether they mean the top or the bottom of the breastbone; neither makes any sense to me.

That is not the point. Silly dress codes happen. The really amazing thing that after 18 out of the 352 students violated the code they were given a choice of paddling and a three-day suspension, and 17 chose the paddling.

Wow. I'd never imagined a backward place like Alabama would be as open to BDSM as to paddle consenting high school students on taxpayer money. In my home state of Massachusetts it's illegal even between consenting adults, and 10 years ago police even arrested the participants of a BDSM party in Attleboro. The case was thrown out on technicalities, but not before the local population renamed Attleboro into Paddleboro to the great joy of the local authorities. But Alabama? Just wow!

I am probably the last person on earth who should ever joke about the family trees that don't branch, but I often suspects that the states who have the reputation for having a lot of inbred morons tend to have it for a very good reason.

The even more amazing thing than the fact that paddling is offered as a punishment (do they also have whipping? piercing? fisting?) is that out of 18 students given the alternatives between a paddling and not having to go to school for 3 days, 17 chose the paddling. Either Oxford, Alabama is absolutely full of subs in need of a dom, or their school is so much fun that nobody wants to miss any of it even under the threat of being paddled, which sort of makes me wonder what other activities go on in there.

I am also kinda wondering whether they need an extra employee for the prom season.

Yes, we really can!

Now that Massachusetts has elected a Republican to the US Senate for the first time since the 1972 election, is it time for Obama to change his slogan to "Yes, we can make even Massachusetts elect a Republican!"?

Yes, we can!

Today, for the first time ever in my life, I have voted in a national election in a way that actually counted. In every election before this I knew who our state or electoral district would elect in advance. Massachusetts always votes for a Democrat. Everybody knows that.

Except that now it looks like we don't. The race is very close. The reasons vary: lots of people are disappointed with Obama, for various reasons; the healthcare reform is unpopular; many people feel that 60 seats in the Senate is too much for any party; Brown is a rather inoffensive moderate Republican State Senator, whereas Coakley has a well-deserved reputation as an Attorney General who doesn't care much for justice.

But most of all, I think, people are tired of politicians never listening or paying attention or even bothering to campaign. "Who cares about Massachusetts, they'll vote for Democrats no matter what." Nobody has even bothered to set up the exit polls.

Well, now it suddenly looks like it's very close, even the Beloved Leader himself has suddenly decided to visit the state just before the election, and some of the readers of Helsingin Sanomat in faraway Finland are accusing the electorate of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts of being illiterate rednecks for not voting like the Beloved Leader told them to. (Imagine people in Massachusetts being deeply concerned about the position of Keskusta during the Finnish parliamentary election in 2011, and you might realize how this looks to me.)

I think that we need change. For example, a Republican in the Senate after 47 years of Kennedy, may he rest in peace. I have voted for Brown, and hope he will become our new senator, but no matter who gets elected, this election in itself is a victory for Massachusetts. Now we can finally say: yes, we can have a real election just like in Ohio or in Finland!