Happy Independence Day, Finland!

Good thing we got out of Russia when we did. Russia sucks. Lately more than usual.

Happy Independence Day, Finland!

Good thing we got out of Russia when we did. Russia sucks. Lately more than usual.

Happy Independence Day, Finland!

Good thing we got out of Russia when we did. Russia sucks.

Happy Independence Day, Finland!

Good thing we got out of Russia when we did. Russia sucks.

Happy Independence Day, Finland!

Good thing we got out of Russia when we did. Russia sucks.

Открытое письмо российским властям и всем остальным россиянам выражающим свой праведный гнев по поводу дела Анастасии Завгороднеей

Идите на хуй, ребята. Заебали.

Простите за мат, но без мата уже не могу.

Да, у нас здесь в Финляндии запрещено шлепать детей. Нет, за один шлепок никого не отбирают.

Да, знаю что "финский, мать его за ногу, правозащитник" рассказал что отобрали за то что девочка рассказала учительнице про шлепок по попе. Он здесь известен как деревенский идиот и патологический лгун, и в тот день когда он скажет о чем-то правду преисподняя покроется льдом и Финляндия выиграет чемпионат по футболу.

Мама ребенка рассказала о сотрясении мозга у ребенка. Если вы считаете что это бывает от шлепка по попе, это наводит на грустные вопросы о том где у вас находится мозг.

Нет, у нас забирают детей не только у русских. Вы слышите только о руссских потому что нерусскоязычные финны довольно редко ходят жаловаться на местные службы защиты детей в российскую прессу.

Вся ваша информация исходит только от одной стороны, и даже у них есть несколько противоречащих друг другу версий. Нет, вы не получите никаких подробностей от службы защиты детей. У нас конфиденциальность, и они отвечают только суду, родителям и их представителям.

У нас здесь каждых год забирают пару тысяч детей временно, несколько сот детей постоянно с их (или родительским, если им нет 12) согласием и несколько десятков без их согласия. Каждый из тех у кого забрали без их согласия готов рассказывать всем кто хочет слушать какие они белые и пушистые. Да, иногда служба защиты детей ошибается. Эти дела в конце концов решаются в суде, а не иностранной общественностью которой известна одна сторона дела.

Да, многие наши правила, законы и обычаи отличаются от российских. У нас нельзя шлепать детей, и у нас обычно нельзя увезти ребенка из страны если второй родитель ребенка продолжает проживать в стране и не дает разрешения на вывоз. Но я не понимаю почему для настолько многих русских такая новость что в Финляндии живут по финским законам. Те, кто не не хотят жить здесь по финским законам, могут жить в другом месте, например в России. Можно также работать над изменением законов, но это обычно получается только при достаточном числе единомышленников. Можно также нарушать законы втихаря, но тогда не стоит удивляться если возьмут за жопу.

Если вы уже живете в Финляндии и хотите переехать в Россию чтобы не соблюдать финских законов, то это стоит делать до того как вас взяли за жопу, а не после.

Финская юрисдикция распостраняется на русских детей которые находятся в Финляндии. Не нравится - не привозите или не рожайте. В данном случае это, кстати, речь идет о финских детях даже если у одной из них есть и российское гражданство. Эти дети - финские граждане, которые прожили всю свою жизнь в Финляндии. Их родители - тоже финские граждане, которые прожили большую часть своей взрослой жизни в Финляндии. Какого, простите, хуя мы должны с вами обсуждать дела живущих у нас наших же граждан? Если мы начнем пытаться вмешиваться в дела ваших чиновников в вашей же стране в отношении ваших граждан, то куда вы нас пошлете? Правильно. В данном случае идите сами туда же.

Rimma Salonen's appeal to the Russian people

This is a translation of Rimma Salonen's appeal to the Russian people. The original is here (SAFKA's blog), in Russian, text and video, posted by Johan Bäckman (people should know their heroes). The capitalization is Salonen's, and so is, obviously, the content and the degree of sanity.

Rimma Salonen and Johan Bäckman were both running for Eduskunta in 2011 (Suomen Työväenpuolue STP), getting 16 an 36 votes, respectively.


I would like to ask for help from Russia, and in particular from the "Young Guard", because the situation with my child in Finland has not improved for three years, but quite the contrary - the child is still being isolated from the mother, and I am being openly blackmailed by limiting my contact with my son, Anton. Convinced of the bias of the Finnish justice, I have no illusions about my possibilities of resolving the issue through legal channels in Finland. The President of Russia has repeatedly emphasized that Russia will protect its citizens, wherever they are. Anton and I are citizens of Russia, trapped in a hopeless situation, my son was smuggled away from Russian, depriving the child of its mother and a happy childhood. I am asking the Young Guard to help me to restore justice. I am very grateful to the activists of the Young Guard for their support, and I hope that together we can defend the rights of Russian citizens and legal right of Russian mothers and children to family life.

On April 12 it will be exactly three years since the tragedy of my Russian family. This day was like the first ring of a bell. With the theft of Anton a terrible process started all over the West. They started to steal Russian children in all the countries.

Today the Russian mothers from Germany, Norway, New Zealand, France, and many, many countries turn to me. Anton became a kind of symbol - the tragedy of the Russian families in the West.
3 years ago the third world Hunt for Russian children started.

Russia's strong and clear position on this issueis necessary for the salvation of Russia's future - our children. First of all, in order to stop this wanton outrage of the western child services, under cover of which the worldwide battle for the healthy Russian genes is being waged.

For 3 years I've been in mourning. For 3 years I've been struggling. 3 years ago was a tragic day for the whole of Russia. If today Russia does not wake up, then the tomorrow they'll steal your child, and yours, many children, every child. Who among Russian children will be next - that's the question.

The process of stealing Russian children under any pretext is gaining momentum in Finland. No one is wondering WHY anymore, but everyone is afraid that their own son or daughter will be next. This is the PLAGUE of third millennium. This is a disaster. It is not enough just to talk. One should scream!

We, the Russian mothers, are being kept on a leash in the West. The child services of all the countries are spying on us. Guards and child wardens are following us. Why? Because the demographics of western countries are falling. And putting one Russian child in prison automatically attaches a lot of relatives to that country. Today the West is using Russian children to even out the demographic collapse.

Vladimir Putin has recently said that Russia is one of the few countries in the world that has managed to stop the demographic decline, even out the situation, and there has even been some growth. But this does not mean that Russia should throw away its wealth - our new generation, our Russian children who are being stolen in the West.

As a Russian mother, I appeal to the President of Russia and the Russian people - to turn their faces towards the children born in mixed marriages, to protect them from the ALIENATION from Russia. To see in our stolen children the golden gene pool of the nation, to intergrate them into the Russian people.

Today we have a chance to rally Russia to protect the Russian children who are languishing in the dungeons of the western child services, practically the juvenile prisons of the West. The West is doing everything today to make the Russian children forget the Russian language, the religion of their ancestors, the great Russian culture.

My Russian Anton is a symbol of Russian children imprisoned in the trunk of the juvenile system of the West. A Finnish trunk is showing Russia today what the West has in mind for the Russian children - a prison with no windows and doors. A mobile box for the demographic material.

Our children born in the West are talented and unique, unlike the robots and sex dolls, mass manufactured on an assembly line in the West. That is why Russian children are taken from Russian motherstoday: to erase the the Russian individuality, Russian originality and Russian progressiveness.

The West only wants the demographic material - units in the cells of the demographic tables. All that the states want is to get one more line, head, or being at any price. The battle for the demographic unit is killing the souls of Russian children. Being the mother of Anton, I want to testify - to tell about the terrible Argameddone - the global battle between good and evil, which you are witnessing today. This is the battle for the souls of our Russian children.

The whole "civilized" world is against Russia today. Almost all countries in the world are hunting for Russian girls and boys. This Armageddon is the battlefield for the future of mankind.

Stealing Anton from Russia showed the world that the West is not only not ashamed to steal our children, but that the West has turned the theft of Russian children into PLANNED alienation of Russian biomaterial.

According to the media there is a state plan in Norway, according to which every year 3,000 children have to be TAKEN AWAY and ALIENATED from immigrants without a trial. Extremely. Just because there is the plan. Communes and municipalities in the west are competing with each other, who will take the most children away from the Russian mothers.

And the leaders of the countries call the mayors on the carpet, to reproach them for taking away too FEW children last month or last year. This is what I ran into here in the West.

The theft of Russian children in the West is covered by the veil of SUPER SECRECY. If the mother turns to the media for help, she will be crucified, all contact with the child will be forbidden.

This secrecy and alleged privacy of the FAMILY have been invented in the West in order to conceal the crime. There are no family issues - there is the international HUNT and THEFT of Russian children.

I believe that I will live to see the day when this HUNT will be called a CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY. That there will be a new Nuremberg trial. And the people who stole my son will stand the trial and will receive punishment.

But right now my goal is to be heard. I am pick up a BELL. I want to warn Russia of the trouble that is coming from the WEST, about the PLAGUE OF THE THIRD MILLENNIUM, which is coming from the north and from the south. And the name of the plague is HUNT for RUSSIAN CHILDREN.

Today I want to testify - MY BELL TOLLS FOR THEE. For every Russian. Because now any Russian child can become the second Anton Salonen! There is only one cure for this plague - join our hands together.

Dear Russians! Dear President of Russia! Dear Russian mothers and fathers! Dear Russian people! I, Rimma Salonen, am asking you today to JOIN OUR HANDS for our children, for the most precious thing we have.

Russian people are a great power. The goal of the West is to divide us and to sow discord. But we have a cement which unites us, we have a treasure that we are destined to protect. That is our Russian children.

Today, the West started a battle for the Russian children. And only we - Russian mothers and fathers - can protect them. Our strength lies in Unity. Our strength is that we have joined hands and stood in a circle, defending our children with their bodies and souls.

The Third World HUNT on our children has already begun. And it began with the theft of my Anton. But Russia will withstand it. Hand in hand we are invincible.

Happy Independence Day, Finland!

Good thing we got out of Russia when we did. Russia sucks.

The cassette (CD, DVD, etc.) tax

Since the people who want to collect the media tax on everything rely on polls to decide what people are using their disk space for, why don't they also rely on polls to decide who they should give the money to? Just let the people say whose music/books/movies/shows they have on their CDs, DVDs or USB drives and how much disk space it takes and distribute the money among the authors accordingly? Regardless of whether the author is a writer, a singer, Finnish, foreign or a member of any of the copyright organization. I don't think people have a lot of incentive to lie.

Bäckmanin uusin

Tämän päivän hesarijuttu Bäckmanista sai mut ajattelemaan että suurin osa suomalaisista ei tunne Bäckmanin tuotantoa, mikä on väärin, koska kansan pitäisi tuntea sankareitaan.

Viimeisin juttu joka levisi Venäjän lehdistossa oli juttu velkovenäläisestä naisesta jonka lapsen ilkeät suomalaiset sosiaaliviranomaiset vei. Tässä se on venäjäksi.

Lyhyt yhteenveto asianomaisen versiosta:

- Svetlana-äiti ja Tanja-tytär tulivat pakolaisina Valkovenäjältä (joten en edes tajua miten Venäjä liittyy asiaan) ja saivat kämpän Vaasasta. Tytär (nyt 8-vuotias) meni kouluun ja äiti töihin.
- Huhtikuussa tyttärellä alkoi esiintyä mielialavaihteluita ja paikalliset alan ammattilaiset suosittelivat että se kävisi Venäjällä venäläisellä psykologilla,
- Maahanmuuttovirasto ei päästänyt tyttöä ulos kun täälläkin on psykologeja, ja suositteli että lapsi jätettäisin sosiaaliviranomaisille kahdeksi viikoksi kun äiti käy Venäjällä,
- Pietarissa käydessään äiti menetti asunnon Vaasassa, ja joutui olemaan siellä puoli vuotta lisää kunnes sai säästettyä rahaa vuokrakämppään Helsingissä,
- Kun Svetlana palasi Helsinkiin osoittautui että lapsi otettiin huostaan sillä perusteella että äiti oli kadoksissa. Ja vieläpä Vaasassa eikä Helsingissä minne äiti muutti!
- Äiti nyt asuu Helsingissä kaksiossa jossa on sauna ja parveke, ja naapurissa venäjänkielisiä lapsia.
- Tytär sen sijaan asuu Vaasassa orpokodissa jossa samassa huoneessa on kaksi afrikkalasita tyttöä, eikä ole koulua,
- Äiti saa soittaa tyttärelle ja käydä kylässä, mutta vain tulkin läsnäolleessa, eikä saa puhua mistään surullisesta,
- Bäckmanin mielestä kyse on siitä että venäläisistä lapsista yritetään tehdä suomalaisia.

Onneksi tällä kerralla jutun kirjoittajat taisivat aliarvoida venäläisiä lukijoita: kommenttien yleisin sävy oli että sosiaaliviranomaiset olivat oikeassa kun kerran äiti katosi ulkomaille puoleksi vuodeksi.

Happy Independence Day, Finland!

Good thing we got out of Russia when we did. Russia sucks.

Commie in Finland

Read Inna Latisheva's Ryssänä Suomessa. The name of the book translates as "Russian in Finland", except that the word she uses for Russian is a slur - there is no exact translation for it in English.

The book is ostensibly about how hard it is to live as a foreigner in a place where your country of origin is not well-liked. She does have a point - being such a foreigner in such a place does have its problems, and Russia is not well-liked here, but she often brings this into the realm of ridiculous, claiming for example that company A was a nice place to work in because it was really a Swedish company, and company B was a nasty place because it was a Finnish one.

Most of the book is the story of a woman who was unhappily married and decided to extrapolate her feelings towards her ex-husband to the country.

The story of her life in Finland is not what caught my attention, though. It was the story of who and what she was before. Most every sentence made me think she was lying.

The woman was born in 1955 in Baku and raised in Leningrad. She then starts describing herself as a sweet and innocent girl who believed in her country and the party. Well. I always knew where must have been somebody who believed in that shit.

She got a degree from the propaganda department of Marxism-Leninism university, another one from a real university (she doesn't say which, but apparently a degree in some language or languages), taught languages in the Military academy, and worked as an Intourist guide. Right. Sorry, but this CV doesn't say "an innocent young girl who loved her country and trusted her government". It says "an extremely cynical career KGB weasel" or, in some cases "an extremely cynical career commie weasel whom KGB didn't bother to hire".

At the same time she describes how she was dreaming of bagging herself a foreigner and moving abroad, and also what kind of things she was and wasn't allowed to say to the tourists. Her jumping from "I thought it was so wonderful, I didn't know anything better" to "I knew about everything bad but had to keep quiet" and back are almost endearing. Seriously. If we are talking about 1980, even I knew better, and I was 9.

OK, anyway, the innocent patriotic girl by some accident went to study in a place no decent person would have touched with a 10-foot pole and acquired a job known to provide access to under-the-table money and foreign husbands. Only then her innocent eyes started to open to the fact that there is more money in the West and that her job does indeed provide the opportunity for meeting foreign men.

Well, she met hers. He was tall, handsome, intelligent and foreign, and married to a friend of hers. That last detail didn't bother her, because she remembered Julius Caesar's words "I came, I saw, I conquered". After coming with her to Finland the man brought her to a couple of parties, and she was wondering - and upset - about why the married man does not introduce her as his fiancee at a party attended by his wife and her friends.

Anyway, he did get divorced and they did get married and he didn't turn out to be a very good husband and she thinks that this happened because Finns don't like Russians.

The book has a happy ending, she moved to Spain and is happy there. We'll see if there is a sequel in 20 years.

Finnish and German sausage

Quite often I hear Finns say that German sausage is way better than Finnish sausage. They usually elaborate on this statement in a way (along the lines of "Finnish sausage is made of flour, but German sausage has a lot of meat in it") that makes it very clear that they are comparing the cheapest and the least meaty Finnish sausage with unidentified meaty German one. Often they even name the Finnish point of comparison with its colloquial name "HK Bleu" (HK Sininen lenkki, 43% meat).

The same phenomenon exists with other goods and services, but the sausage example is the most common, so I'll stick with that.

Now, when I buy a sausage in Germany it is usually worse than the ones I buy in Finland. It's hard for me to be sure that German sausages are objectively worse than Finnish ones, even as far as my own taste is concerned, because the familiarity creates a rather strong bias: in Finland I know which kinds of sausage I like the best, and I buy them; in Germany I have to select from a large number of sausages whose list of ingredients looks good, and this selection is rarely optimal.

Which makes me wonder: why doesn't this bias work for those other people? I mean, if they dislike HK Bleu, why haven't they moved on?

The ideas that come to mind are:

1. They are saying this in bad faith for some reason (why?), and are in fact well aware that they are comparing a near-lowest-quality Finnish sausage with average and above-average German sausage,

2. They are really comparing Finland's near-worst with Germany's near-worst and might actually be right.

3. They are for some reason (how?) unaware that there are lots of Finnish sausages with meat content of over 70%.

Any ideas?

P.S. I am being unfair to HK Bleu. It is the worst sausage I tasted and didn't seem to have any meat at all, but the same manufacturer (HK) also produced a light version with only 5% of meat. I didn't really need to know that, but I decided to share the info with my readers anyway. They also produce delicious stuff that's 80% meat.

The common voice of every right-thinking immigrant

An immigrant parliament is being founded in Finland, by Alexis Kouros, Umayya Abu-Hanna and a bunch of other professional multiculturalists. The idea is to have all the immigrants vote for the parliament, and have the parliament give advice to the officials and the lawmakers and propose new laws.

(Wait a minute! Propose new laws? Only the government and the MPs can propose new laws. I hope they mean "lobby for the new laws" or something.)

The new organ does not, thank God for small favors, have any financing yet. They are thinking of living off immigrants' own donations, and maybe asking the state and EU for money.

Judging from the reactions on the English-speaking and Russian-speaking immigrant forums, the immigrant donations will be just enough to buy them some coffee - if they already have a coffee machine.

As an immigrant and a Finnish citizen, my second thought was "why do I need their parliament when I can vote for the real one?". (The first thought was rather unprintable.) The immigrant parliament is supposed to represent non-citizens as well. I think that there is a very good reason why we don't let non-citizens vote on the matters of state. Surprisingly enough most non-citizens with whom I have ever discussed it understand those reasons pretty well.

The new parliament-to-be has a webpage already. There Kouros tries to explain the idea.

According to him the idea of the parliament is to give a common voice to all immigrants. The real parliament doesn't serve this purpose, because only a few immigrants can get elected and they are not necessarily the right-thinking kind of people.

Here is what he says: "Even if we had a few immigrant candidates in the parliament, that would not solve the problem of an absent, unified immigrant voice. MPs are elected by a general vote, which means that most probably the vote of the Finnish community determines who is elected."

Yeah, Mr. Kouros, the majority determines who gets elected. This is, like, the idea of democracy. And the absence of the unified voice of the immigrant community just might mean that the immigrant community does not have a fucking unified voice.

Seriously - what does the immigrant community have in common with each other? I don't even mean that some are Somalis, and some are Russians and some are Americans and some have come to work and some have come as refugees. I mean that I don't even have any voting issues in common even with my own group, the Americans who came here to work. What do we have in common to vote for? A right-wing American will vote for the right, a left-wing for the left, an environmentalist just might vote for the Greens, or maybe not, a person concerned about Islamism might vote for Perussuomalaiset or for Muutos 2011, and an American who has moved to rural Finland just might - gasp - vote for Keskusta.

Besides, the tone of Kouros's interview ("in a worst-case scenario, an anti-immigrant person, with an immigrant background may be elected") suggests that the common voice his is looking for specifically doesn't include the common voice of the immigrants who'd vote for Perussuomalaiset or for Muutos 2011.

Kouros and the other bullshit artists are not very specific as to who can vote. They say that they are trying to be as inclusive as possible, including the actual immigrants, the people at least one of whose parents was an immigrant, and people adopted from abroad. Kouros expresses hope that only the people who see themselves as immigrants will vote; Abu-Hanna says that the immigrant identity is the most important thing.

Yes, great idea: choose your voters based on how they feel about themselves and their place in the Finnish society. Then tell everyone else that they represent all the immigrants.

As an aside: how are they going to find out who has immigrant parents and who doesn't? If they can get that kind of information out of the population register, it's a bigger problem than their whole parliament.

Kouros feels that he has not been accepted as a Finn during the 20 years he's lived in Finland. If I were mean (and I obviously am) I'd say that getting a real job would be a step in the right direction.

When asked about how would the Finnish community react to this parliament, Kouros gets a bit aggressive:

"I am sure that there will be some sectors of society that will not like this project, but those are the people who don’t want immigrants to exist at all. In general, I am certain that it will be well received and appreciated."

Well, thanks for telling me how I feel about my own existence, and all those other folks on the immigrant forums as well. So far as I have seen the immigrants are in fact the sector of society who like this parliament idea the least.

Greens 1, trams 0

How come every time there is some Green demonstration in Helsinki the trams stop running properly? I've seen many different kinds of demonstrations in town, and pretty much everyone else, including the bearded supporters of Hezbollah, had the sense to stay off the tram tracks. But I guess protesting the new nuclear power plants is too important to allow one's fellow men and women even a partial use of public transportation.

Helsingin Sanomat forum moderators rather open-minded for once

"No Hitler oli hyvä mies ja oikealla asialla, kun pyrki hävittämään nämä tuholaiset maailmasta, mutta homma jäi vain hieman kesken. On vain ajan kysymys, milloin nouseva äärioikeisto hoitaa homman vihdoinkin loppuun!"

(Translation: "Well, Hitler was a good man and he was doing the right thing when he tried to remove this vermin [Jews] from the world, but he didn't quite get the job done. It's a question of time when the rising far right will finally get the job finished.")

That was one of the readers of Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest Finnish daily, commenting on an article about Israel asking its citizens to leave Sinai.

Now, I am all for the right of newspapers (and anyone else, for that matter) to have unmoderated forums, where anyone can write anything and where things get deleted only by a court order or not at all. This, however, is a pre-moderated forum that claims not to tolerate any racism or group hatred, and that has routinely removed messages that were even slightly offensive to some other groups. It's not the question of moderators not having noticed it yet, either - in order to be posted there the thing (signed with the nickname "Natsi" (nazi), although in my experience actual nazis for obvious reasons rarely compare Jews to nazis, as he/she does elsewhere in the posting) had to go through a moderator.

I would really like to know: what the hell was the moderator thinking?

Edit: Now they have removed that posting after more than 24 hours, but the question still stands.

Change?

Lately I've been following a Russian forum - a forum for the Russians living in Finland. Some of it is nice social fun, some of it elicits morbid curiosity in the manner of a train wreck, and some of it is useful social info.

Anyway, lately they were talking, among other things, about children and schools. More specifically, about how many schools (but not all) automatically put native speakers of the foreign languages into Finnish for foreigners classes, even if they also happen to speak Finnish at a native level, or a sufficient level to attend a native class. In all the cases they mentioned the situation was fixed when the parents protested.

I had suspected as much. A few months ago there was an article featuring a 13-year old Somali boy born in Finland who was in a Finnish for foreigners class in school. At that point I figured that either the kid was dumb as a rock or the school system was dumb as a whole pile of rocks - and the kid didn't seem particularly dumb.

Anyway, some schools - apparently many - stick kids with fluent Finnish into classes for foreigners, and the parents learn about it when the kid complains at home about the school being superboring and consisting mostly of Finnish 101.

My reaction to that was "WTF?". My Finnish friends' reaction to that was "well, how is the school to know?" ("ask the kid" is the obvious answer) and "well, this whole immigration thing is so new to us, we are still figuring out what to do and how to do it right".

This is a disturbing thing in and of itself. When we came to the US we settled in a state with a proud 350-year-old tradition of multiculturalism (ok, in the beginning it was often about shooting Indians and hanging Quakers, but let's not go into that). I went to school in a town where 25-30% of residents were foreign-born. It was one of the most multiethnic schools around, and it was a nice school. As of a couple of years ago, about 27% of residents are still foreign-born and the schools are still good.

Stable 30% of foreign students in Brookline schools is not a problem, but do the people here in Finland realize how fast the change is happening here? 15 years ago there were very few foreigners in schools; now some schools have more than 50% of foreign-language students, in spite of the fact that there is still a rather small percentage of foreigners in Finland.

What can or should be done? Frankly, I don't know and I suspect neither does anyone else. What shouldn't be done, however, can be learned from the long sad history of the Boston school district.

Happy Independence Day, Finland!

Good thing we got out of Russia when we did. Russia sucks.

Citizenship: the process

First of all, forget about whether the residence requirement is 5 years or 6. It was 5 until 2003; then they made it 6; now they are planning to make it 5 again. The difference is not essential in comparison to other things: when the required residence period starts, and whether or not it can be interrupted.

The law of 2003 allowed the possibility of interrupted residence: you can apply after 6 years of continuous residence, of after accruing 8 years of residence during your lifetime. The new one reduces those to 5 and 7.

More importantly: the law of 2003, and the previous one as well, counted as residence only A-permit and permanent permit residence - you could live all your life here on a B-permit and never be eligible to apply for the citizenship. (I won't do into A- and B-statuses here; enough to say that the student and temporary workers get B, and some of the permanent workers get B for the first 2 years.)

In 2007 a court found a bug in the law, and after that everything started counting as residence. This was in fact quite unprecedented: there are other countries that count temporary-status residence for citizenship eligibility, but AFAIK Finland is currently the only one that also gives citizenship to people still living on temporary status.

The new law is a compromise: it will count half of the B-status time towards the citizenship, but will allow people to apply for citizenship only after they got A-status.

That, BTW, is why I only got the citizenship now. I have lived in Finland for about 14 years, the last 8 of them continuously, but since I was a student, a temporary worker, and for the first 2 years of the last 8 a B-status permanent worker, I only became eligible to apply after the 2007 court decision (if not for it, I would only be eligible to apply 4 weeks from now).

Anyway, once the Immigration Service mentioned the court decision sometime it March, the rest was easy. I signed up for the language test. I cannot really comment on the level of the test, because instead of signing up for the medium level (the one for the people who want the citizenship) I signed up for the high level (the one for people with stupid macho tendencies who want to pay extra 45 euro or so and take a harder test for a piece of paper they'll never use). It had 6 parts of varying difficulty - more about it later. I got 6 (the highest grade) on every one of them. Go me!

With the test result, 400 euro and a filled application I went to the immigration police sometime in early May. Yesterday I got a letter with two pieces of paper. One of them said "you are a Finnish citizen now". The other said "go to the immigration police and have them cancel your residence permit, a citizen is not supposed to have one".

Next year, a special program for Martians...

The Foreign Ministry says that more than half of the diplomas of the West African students who have applied for residence permits in June and July on order to study in Hamk are in fact fake.

The applicants are mostly from Ghana and Nigeria, and were selected in a test that was given in Ghana after 4 out of 5 Hamk's English-language technical programs turned out to be almost empty.

I am not asking why the students faked the papers. I'd probably do the same. I wanna know why the hell Hamk has 5 English-language programs, 4 of which are almost empty.

Hamk or Hämeen korkeakoulu is a technical college of about 7000 students in the historical province of Häme, which is now three smaller provinces. It has five degree programs in English, out of the total of 25: Automation Engineering, Construction Engineering, International Business, Mechanical Engineering and Production Technology, and Supply Chain Management. They are starting the sixth this fall: Industrial Management.

There are 1301 English-speaking people living in Häme, out of 22192 foreign language speakers, and a total population of 854593. Does this maybe explain why they are having a bit of trouble finding folks willing to study Supply Chain Management in English? Maybe somebody in there should also study demand a little bit? Maybe having 20% of the study programs in English is not such a bright idea in an area where 97% of population are Finnish speakers?

Finland offers free education to foreigners, including non-EU foreigners. It's very nice of them to do, of course, and I have myself benefited from that in my own time. However, from Finland's point of view I can see only two purposes in such generosity: getting some new educated workforce, or spreading and promoting the Finnish culture around the world. I don't see how having foreigners in their own separate English-language programs can benefit either of these.

It's even worse if those programs are meant for the foreign-born young people who are already living in Finland. How do they expect them to integrate and find work if their college environment is all English-speaking and if they don't speak Finnish in the first place? Yes, high-tech fields do accept non-Finnish-speaking employees, but in general this is Finland, and people speak Finnish here. OK, they speak Swedish in some places, but Häme isn't one of them. Not speaking any Finnish is a serious disadvantage, and not speaking any Finnish after having graduated from a Finnish college is even more so.

I don't mind it if some Africans with a genuine interest in Finland come to study something useful in some normal Finnish study program and stay to work, or even go back. I do mind spending the taxpayer money for a number of absolutely useless programs that the school cannot even fill without a hunting trip abroad.