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.

Dear Russian leaders

I am not your citizen. I have never even seen your country since its establishment in 1991, and I would like to keep it that way. However, I do speak the same language, and intend to continue doing so, and I am starting to feel your undying love for me. Again.

I was born in the USSR, lived there for 16 years, and, like all the citizens, was very much loved by the authorities. This love was expressed in not allowing people to leave, or allowing it only with great difficulty. I think that if you express such a love for your partner in a civilized country, it is called unlawful restraint and punished by several years of imprisonment; the Soviet authorities, however, wrote their own laws and had nobody who could put them in prison where they so obviously belonged.

Eventually we did manage to leave, and the Soviet authorities had better things to do that loving us at a distance - after all, they had all of Eastern Europe to love.

In 1989 the Eastern block started disintegrating, and in 1991 the Soviet Union fell apart, and all the citizens held in the country by authorities' love finally had the opportunity to leave. For a while Russia had other things to do than to express forcible unrequited love to people beyond its borders. Now, however, you are at it again.

Your president just said that you consider it your right to protect the Russian-speaking people beyond your borders. Yes, that means me. Now face it: every single Russian speaker who left Russia and lives as a member of a minority beyond your borders is there because he or she, for one reason or another, chose not to live as member of the majority within your borders. And every single Russian speaker who was born outside of Russia in the other parts of the former Soviet Union and would actually prefer to live as a part of a Russian majority, is still outside Russia because you did not make him or her welcome. It's your country, of course, and you don't have to make them welcome unless you want to, but you appear to have a disturbing tendency to only welcome them when they come with their own land - or somebody else's.

You, of course, are not the only ones to have wanted to love and protect me when I had absolutely no desire to be loved or protected. Several times in my life I have encountered men who wanted to love and protect me in the same way. They had to be convinced otherwise, usually with the help of heavy or sharp objects. When a guy comes up to me in a street at night, saying things like "nice tits" or "wanna fuck" or "I have a huge dick", I am not particularly concerned, because they usually just annoy me for a while and go away. When a strange man comes up to me and says that he would like to walk me home and protect me, I immediately start looking for something heavy, because these situations have always ended in violence.

There are two key differences here. First of all, those men were strangers, and you are publicly known. Unfortunately whatever is known about you does not work in your favor at all. Second, those men's expressed desire to protect me makes me look for an empty bottle or suchlike. When you say you want to protect me, I feel like looking for a good-sized nuclear arsenal.

Anyway - on some level I wish I could really share my feelings, but for that I would need the aforementioned nuclear arsenal, which I don't currently have, and besides it would hurt a lot of innocent civilians who haven't even voted for you. So, could you just please bugger off together with your love, and leave us in peace? Preferably before somebody's feelings get expressed by weapons.

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.

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.

I want nukes

Imagine that I have come to Rautatientori with a pistol. I aim it at one person, then at another, and tell them that I'll kill them all. Would anybody say "don't worry, she doesn't really mean it"? "Don't worry, it's just her usual rhetoric, just look at all her postings mentioning raping people with cactii." "She just wants to look scary so that people will give her some money." (I believe the technical term for the latter is "armed robbery".)

How long will I have to threaten before the talk starts to shift from "she doesn't really mean it" to "she probably doesn't really mean it, and her pistol is probably no good anyway, and she is probably a lousy shot"? And if I threaten to go home and get a proper automatic weapon, will people actually wait for me to do that?

If nobody is gonna take that shit from me, why are people taking it from a dude who a) actually has nukes, b) has threatened to attack the US and Japan with said nukes, and wipe South Korea from the face of the Earth, and c) whose only redeeming quality appears to be that he doesn't have a very good delivery system for said nukes - yet? Granted, kicking is ass his way harder than kicking mine, but he does appear a somewhat bigger threat as well, what with the nukes and a 1.2-million active-duty army (that's for a country with 24 million people - think about it).

10 years ago we (the US) invaded a country ruled by a dictator who was alleged to have weapons of mass destruction. Despite all the effort the weapons of mass destruction were not found, and I - despite not being a supporter of said war - remember thinking for a moment, in a rather cynical way, that it might be better to kick the guy's ass before he has the weapons of mass destruction and not after. And now there is a guy who actually has weapons of mass destruction, and has threatened several countries with them, and nobody is doing anything.

I think the only message to be learned from here is that if you happen to be an insane dictator, your best bet is to get some nukes. Pretty soon every dictator is gonna be getting nukes. Hell, I want to have nukes of my own, and I am not ever a dictator yet. I even have a grand plan for my nukes: gonna make a lot of noise, threaten a lot of neighbors, then give the nukes up and receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

What do the following organizations have in common, once again?

The previous one is here.

The list is as follows: Arabikansojen ystävyysseura, Aseistakieltäytyjäliitto, Helsingin Sadankomitea, Helsingin yliopiston Sitoutumaton vasemmisto, Irakilaisten pakolaisten kv-federaation Suomen osasto, Irakin naisten yhdistys Suomessa, Irakin ja Iranin työväen kommunistisen puolueen Suomen osasto, Kommunistinen nuorisoliitto, Loviisan rauhanfoorumi, Lääkärin sosiaalinen vastuu, Maan ystävät, Naiset rauhan puolesta, Naisten kansainvälinen rauhan ja vapauden liitto - Suomen osasto, Pand - Taiteilijat rauhan puolesta, SKP, Sosialidemokraattiset nuoret, Sosialistiliitto, Suomen demokraattiset lakimiehet - DEMLA, Suomen kristillinen rauhanliike, Suomen rauhanliitto - YK-yhdistys ry, Suomen rauhanpuolustajat, Vasemmistonuoret, Vihreät nuoret ja opiskelijat.

These are the groups that have organized the big demonstration against the war in Iraq in Helsinki on 15.2.2003.

Now I decided to find out how they feel about the current carnage in Syria. Judging from their web pages, they don't give a flying fuck, except for Arabikansojen ystävyysseura who at least mentioned it. Not that really I blame them, I don't either, and I don't see what the Green party or the people who are against the conscription have to do with foreign wars anyway.

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.

A girl who was interested in politics

Somebody just implied to me that there must have been something wrong with me if at 16 I was more interested in free elections than in a prince on a white horse. She did not know that this was also the case at 10. I was gonna tell her off, along the lines of "takes all kinds to make a world", and then started wondering whether the above was in fact a sign that something was wrong with the country.

(Yes, I know that something was wrong with the country. OK, make it "almost everything". I am just wondering whether my interest in politics was a symptom of that.)

I sort of know where the woman who thinks something was wrong with me is coming from. She is also from the Soviet Union, a few years older than me. During our childhood everything was full of politics. Newspapers were full of politics (much more so than in the West at any point that I remember), and so was the TV. We had all kinds of politics (just a figure of speech - it was just one kind of politics) shoved down our throats from morning till night, politics before class, politics during class, politics after class, etc. Everything we did was interpreted as political statement. Personal was very much political, whether one wanted it or not.

Under those circumstances quite a lot of people became very strongly apolitical, in a "just leave me in peace to live my sex life and wear whatever I want, I am not interested in politics". At the time I wondered whether the leaders realized that their attempt to make everyone interested in their politics had the result opposite of the intended; nowadays, older and even more cynical, I wonder whether this was in fact the intended effect.

Anyway, this reaction is barely comprehensible to me now, and was even less comprehensible at the time. My personal is usually not very political, but it is quite clear to me that if the powers that be have chosen to lecture me on the style of my shirt, the personal has become the political whether I want it or not.

The funny thing was that pretty much everyone I knew understood that if a bully comes up to you in the street and expresses desire to punch you in the nose because he is offended by your makeup the thing to do was not to explain that the makeup was not intended as a personal offense to him - he knows it as well as you do - but to hit hard and/or run fast. But I felt fairly alone with the idea that the same is the case for the governments. Although, obviously, this was not the kind of thing I could easily discuss with my classmates, so I was pretty much limited to listening.

Yes, I also wished to be left in peace, I just realized that it was not gonna happen, or in any case not by leaving *them* in peace.

I remember the day that Brezhnev died. I was 11, and sat in class wondering whether the next guy was gonna be some new version of Stalin, and the possible implications of it. Nobody, including myself, ever mentioned this possibility out loud, but the general feeling that our lives depend on who the new guy will be was there. How can one not be interested in politics under those circumstances?

On terrorism and responsibility

There was a lot of talk lately on the anti-islam and anti-multiculturalism movement and the responsibility for the anti-multiculturalism terrorist Anders Breivik and his acts.

Some people demanded that we condemn him, some accused us of trying to avoid responsibility every time some of us did condemn him, some took the condemnations as an admission of guilt, some took absense of condemnation as silent support, etc. Some of us did condemn him publicly, some considered condemnation as an admission of guilt and said we had nothing to do with it, etc.

I guess this is all just different ways of different people for dealing with it. Personally, I don't connect condemnation to guilt, and of course I do condemn him (one could have figured that out from my rhino rape comments). And no, I don't consider myself guilty in any way just because a terrorist happened to have some of the same political goals as myself.

Some people, however, tried to score points on the terrorist attack (I don't want to single out anyone, there was unfortunately too many) saying things like that Breivik's actions were a result of a misguided immigration policy, etc. Basically saying that if the society had agreed to whatever Breivik wanted in advance he wouldn't have killed all those people.

Yeah, I understand that a lot of people are upset that Breivik's act has hurt the anti-multiculturalism and anti-islamism movements. But terrorist acts are supposed to hurt the causes in the name of which they are committed. Even when those causes happen to be ours. Otherwise terrorism works, and you get more terrorists.

We (well, apart from the people who actually encouraged him to take up terrorism, if any) are not responsible for Breivik and what he has done. But if we start trying to score political points off his murders, or, God forbid, succeed in scoring those points, we sure as hell are gonna be responsible for the next ones. Terrorism shouldn't be rewarded.

Sandmonkey

Sandmonkey, an Egyptian blogger who has been reporting on Twitter on the current events in Egypt, just got arrested.

(Yes, he is not the only one, he is just the one I've been reading for some years now.)

Edit: witnesses say he was arrested while taking medical supplies to Tahrir square and that the police is answering his phone. And now his blog has been shut down.

Egypt

I feel like I should say something about the events in Tunisia and Egypt, and what could I say? I don't know a fuck, and I suspect neither does anyone else. There is one thing I can say, though: you know you have become an old conservative when you hear about an uprising and your first thought is "how is it gonna affect our interests in the region?" ("Our" means the US here; I would also be concerned about Finland's interests there if Finland had any.)


First of all, Yusuf al-Qaradawi supports the revolution in Egypt, which makes me suspect that this is a bad thing. OTOH, Sandmonkey, whose opinion I respect, is out there and seems to believe that this is not about putting the Muslim Brotherhood in power. And then again, in 1979 there were quite a lot of people in Iran who didn't believe their revolution was about putting the islamists in power, and guess who is still in power over there?

Speaking about Sandmonkey: he is currently reporting (on Twitter) that there is no food or gas available, and no Internet. He is tweeting by phone through a friend in Jordan.

All the neighbors' reaction to the events in Egypt can be well summarized by the words "oh, shit!".

The US administration said that Mubarak should address the legitimate grievances of the people of Egypt, which did sound a bit silly considering that Mubarak himself is in fact the legitimate grievance of the people of Egypt, but on the other hand what could they say? "We have invested a lot of money into that motherfucker, and now we are a bit miffed that you are kicking his ass out, but we are ready to invaest the same money into the next motherfucker as long as he is not any more trouble than this one"?

There is some unrest in Jordan and Yemen, and if they start a proper revolution in Saudi Arabia, I am totally buying popcorn for the first time ever in my misspent life. Which is not really a bright idea, since I don't have a TV and don't eat popcorn either.

Oh well. Let's wait and see.

Communists are crazy, part 452542

HS says that somebody blew up Stalin's monument in the Ukraine, in the city of Zaporozhye. My first thought was "no shit". The second thought was "what the hell was the monument doing there anyway?".

For those who don't know, Stalin has murdered millions of Ukranians.

They really should get rid of all the monuments of genocidal maniacs from the USSR time, I thought, and then read that the monument was put up last May.

WTF, really? Was it there waiting for Hitler, Che Guevara and Pol Pot, as a friend of mine suggested? Or just to scare children? Who put the damn thing up? I wanted to see the person.

Quick googling found, among other things, that the leader of Ukraine's Communist party considers Stalin to be the greatest politician of modern times. Some more quick googling found that it was Zaporozhye's Communist party committee that put the monument there in the first place.

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.

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!

The end is nigh, and Denmark is running out of tarmac space, too

I think I was seven when I first read about buying and selling indulgences in a novel set in 16th-century Belgium. The idea struck me as rather dumb even then, at least from the point of view of the buyers.

Are we having some kind of neo-middle-ages now? Blasphemers are being burned at the stake, world leaders talk about impending end that is about to befall us for our sins and in general sound like apocalyptic madmen, and otherwise perfectly sensible people are buying carbon indulgences. Sold, no doubt, by people who are strongly and publicly concerned for the environment.

As I have said before, I am a simple woman who doesn't know much about climate science. No, I am not pretending to be a prole here, but of my two degrees one is in Linguistics and the other is in Computer Science, and none is in Meteorology or Climate Science. So probably I shouldn't be saying anything. On the other hand, these considerations about the lack of education don't seem to deter anyone else, starting with Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an avid air traveler and an engineer.

(A mean-spirited Guardian commenter calculated Mr. Pachauri's travel miles for the period of Jan 07 - July 08 at 443243, based on his his public appearance schedule. Mr. Pachauri supports heavy aviation taxes, which IPCC will undoubtedly pay for him.)

There is some disturbing point about science and faith in here somewhere. We take our science on faith; we believe in whatever they tell us in secondary-school astronomy much the same way as some centuries ago people believed when they were told that the sun revolved around the earth. What makes the difference is the scientific method and the scientific consensus; how much faith are you ready to put in either of those after those emails from Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia got published? Especially since the message is pretty much "the end is nigh, give us power and money"?

(A very disturbing off-topic aside: the reason we abhor the human sacrifices of the ancient cultures is that we know they didn't work; if they did, we'd be totally doing it all the time.)

Anyway, as I've said before, I might not know much about climate, but I sure know politics, religion and bullshit when I see it. I am sure I am the least environmentally conscious person in the Western world. I use energy-saving lamps because I happen to like them, public transportation because I live in a place where it is very good, and I wouldn't ever think of giving up anything I really wanted for the environment. But you know, I suspect that if I really cared, like all those politicians surely do, I'd at least consider some small sacrifices. Like, flying first-class in a commercial aircraft instead of taking my own private jet? Or maybe at least carpooling, or rather private-jet-pooling with some other dignitary coming from the same city?

But that's just me, and that's probably why they don't invite me to any summits. Prince Charles and Gordon Brown apparently felt it was unprincely or un-prime-ministerial to share the same private jet.

Just before the summit, the Copenhagen airport reported that it was expecting 140 extra private jets, and was unable to accomodate them all, so they'd have to be parked in other Danish airports and in Sweden. More than 1200 limos were ordered.

Is it just me, or does it seem to you that those people don't believe in the imminent apocalypse any more than I do?

Wish we knew the names of everyone who attended the global warming (sorry, it's climate change now) summit in private jets and then came home and told the peasants not to fly on vacation. People should know their heroes.

From Ilkka's keyboard to God's eyes?

Some kinds of development is not very hard to predict, but it's still very funny when somebody predicts something and the next day it happens.

Yesterday Ilkka mentioned that "there is a serious fracture hidden inside the progressive vanguard, lying in wait between the urban SWPL types and the green eco-activists".

Today, the nuts actually decided to separate themselves from the granola.

This is the page I saw on a few IRC channels and considered a joke until I noticed that Vihreä Lanka is linking to it as the actual program of the new party.

To quote a few:

Kaikki vihreän etiikan ja maailmankatsomuksen muodot sallitaan, kunhan ne kaikki ovat liikkeessä alisteisia syväekologiselle ekosentristiselle holismille.

Me hyväksymme kaikki toiminnan muodot vallitsevaa järjestelmää vastaan, niillä jokaisella on aikansa ja paikkansa.

Olemme linkolalaisia ja paloheimolaisia, olemme primitivistejä ja kommunalisteja sekä sosiaaliekologeja. Me olemme ekobolshevikkeja ja ekoanarkisteja, ekokonservatiivivallankumouksellisia ja ekososialisteja. Olemme ekofeministejä, ekouskonnollisia, ekonihilistejä, ekohumanisteja, ekosyndikalisteja, survivalisteja ja eläinoikeustaistelijoita.

Vallitseva ryösteliäs maailmanjärjestys, tämä koko ihmiskunnan kuolonmarssille pakottanut kaikenmurhaava sivilisaatiomme, huutaa päällensä oikeutettua kostoa. On lyötävä alas tämä koko vanha maailma.

Jos Linkola olisi kuollut, hän kääntyisi haudassaan.

Ihmisten on avattava silmänsä; aikamme tuhon ideologia ei ole uusliberalismi, vaan liberalismi yleensä.

Reformismipyyteistä irtisanoutuminen tarkoittaa, että jätämme aikaa vievän, työlään ja tarkoituksettoman parlamenttipelleilyn vähämielisempien koikkelehtijoiden temmellyskentäksi.

Emme aio myöskään siis hirttää itseämme naurettavaan legalismin ohjenuoraan. Käytännön vaatimukset, käytettyjen keinojen toimivuus päämäärien saavuttamisessa sanelevat toiminnan muodon. Jos päämäärä ei pyhitä keinoja, niin mikä sitten?

Suora toiminta on radikaaleimmissa muodoissaan suuressa määrin "ulkoistettava" autonomisille soluille31 ja yhteistyökumppaneille.

Äärimmäisen tarpeellista on myös luopua ns. positiivisen eli aktiivisen47 omistusoikeuden periaatteesta,48 ja siirtyä passiivisen omistusoikeuden periaatteeseen. Omistaminen ei siis ole luovuttamaton sisäsyntyinen ja automaattinen perusoikeus,49 vaan omistuksessa on kysymys siitä että toistaiseksi annetaan jonkun jotakin omistaa, sikäli mikäli siitä ei ole kokonaisuudelle haittaa.

Rikokset elonkehää ja tulevia sukupolvia kohtaan tulee tuomita mitä drakonisimman käytännön mukaan. Tämä oikeus ei tunnusta kansallisia rajoja. Mikäli kumousvalta tulee Suomessa voimaan, on se velvoitettu tätä oikeutta levittämään ja toimeenpanemaan myös rajojemme ulkopuolella.

Kaupunkien (sikäli mikäli niitä päätetään ylläpitää) tulee lakata olemasta ravinnontuotannollisesti katsoen loiskasvaimia. Niiden on kyettävä tuottamaan itse merkittävä osa ravinnostaan. Koulut, työpaikat ja kotitaloudet/taloyhtiöt tulee ottaa mukaan ravinnontuotantoon.

Imperialismin Suuri Saatana, Yhdysvallat, elonkehän suurin vihollinen on kurkottanut kuolettavat lonkeronsa yltympäriinsä rakasta palloamme näiden.

Nykyistä liberaalidemokratiaa voimme ainakin pitää kuoleman uskontona.

The shit has hit the fan

The last couple of days were full of politicians' talk about how horrible it is that Perussuomalaiset won, and whose fault that was.

This, however, is pretty unbelievable:

Tuija Brax, the Minister of Justice, says that the ministry will start teaching chairpeople of the city councils to censor anti-immigration, anti-immigrant and anti-minority speech (in the council meetings, I assume, not in the city streets).

First of all, speech inciting against racial, ethnic and religious groups is already banned by the criminal law. The law bans all public speech of the "kill the X" kind, and also of the "all Y are disgusting smelly assholes" kind. I am not sure whether or not city councils are "public" in the sense meant by the law, but what I want to know is whether Brax thinks that a) the elected city council members will say things mentioned above, or b) the elected city council members will say things like "I think we should also collect crime statistics by the country of birth of the perpetrator", and that this should be censored.

In general there has been a lot of discussion about the horrible things that Some People (tm) say about immigrants in general or some ethnic or religious groups in particular. Usually the discussion has deteriorated into claiming that these things are not true, but IMO a more relevant question to the people who think that the new anti-multiculturalist council members and their opinions are horrible would be: what kind of negative things, in your opinion, can one say about an ethnic or religious group, assuming that those things are in fact statistically true? (For the purpose of this question assume that the facts are presented in a neutral way.)

"Eek! Eek! People elected the wrong candidates!"

The municipal election is over. Congratulations to Jussi Halla-aho, and everyone else whom I wanted to win and who won.

It is probably a law of nature that after an election the winners loudly declare that The People Have Spoken, and the losers try to come up with polite ways of saying that the people were mistaken, brainwashed or simply damn stupid. This is especially the case when the winners happen to be elitist (appeal to the people who earn more than the journalists) or populist (appeal to the people whom journalists consider lower-class but who still earn more than the journalists).

The keyword, however, is "polite". Helsingin Sanomat's reaction at first was anything but. Then somebody more sensible woke up.

I understand HS's shock when Jussi Halla-aho, who is just a guy with a blog who criticizes the current immigration policies, gets 2916 votes, and Astrid Thors, the actual immigration minister, gets 2450. This is no reason to call him an opponent of immigrants (they fixed that later), or to wring hands and wonder what went wrong and what kind of bad things happened to people that they want to vote for Halla-aho. Maybe they should rather read his writings, he's been writing for a while now about the bad things that have been happening.

On a lighter and snarkier note: in all my years in Finland there has been only one person who refused to talk to me on account of me being a foreigner, and it certainly wasn't Jussi.