Citizen of the World

I don't like it much when people ask me where I am from, because any response would of necessity be either longer than the asker expects, or less truthful than the asker expects, or both. "Born in Russia, moved to the US as a teenager, moved to Finland as an adult" doesn't sound like much, but you'd be surprised how many people's mental buffers it overflows.

A very common response to whatever I say is "ah, a citizen of the world..." I don't usually berate them for that, because they just don't know what to say and say whatever comes to mind, but my gut reaction is "no, I am not".

No, I am not a citizen of the world. I am a citizen of the United States and Finland, just like my passports say.

I don't think anyone can be a citizen of the world, really. Obviously I don't mean "citizen" to denote a legal citizenship here, although I doubt that there is any one person who'd managed to collect all the world's citizenships, but the kind of cultural connection that citizens mostly have to their countries.

I am a citizen of two countries, and have various amounts of cultural connections to a few more. If my life had turned out differently, there could have been just one country, or three. Not the world. The reasons are the same as the reasons why a polyamorous person can have a relationship with two partners, or three, but nobody can have a meaningful relationship with a large apartment building. Nobody has the time for a meaningful couple relationship with a hundred people, and an apartment building usually contains at least a few people that you wouldn't want to have a relationship with even if they were the last folks on earth. There are countries like that, too.

Yes, I also know people don't really mean a true connection to all the countries of the world when they speak about citizens of the world. In fact every person whom I have heard call him or herself a citizen of the world meant something quite the opposite of a connection. These are people who move from country to country every few years, speak only English (or English and their native language), have some professional jobs where English is enough, mostly hang out with each other and generally avoid developing any connection with whatever country they happen to live in. A perfectly valid lifestyle, to be sure, but definitely not me.

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.

Begging is getting more popular

For those who don't speak Finnish: after Romania joined the EU a lot of beggars came to Finland from Romania. They are very poor but somehow able to afford the trip. This guy says "Help a not-so-poor finance student who cannot afford a trip to Romania," and on the other side "get a good conscience, give money to me. Checks and account transfers are OK too".

It's not fair!

Food is not supposed to bite back, and neither is drink.

Yesterday I was at a picnic. At some point I raised my glass and tried to drink from it, and it bit me on a lip. Turned out to be a wasp. Ouch.

Now I am traumatized for life and keep staring at my teacup suspiciously.

Evil scrollbar, KDE

Suddenly, for no good reason at all, my scrollbars started misbehaving. A new computer doesn't constitute a good reason, especially since both the new and the old one are running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx with KDE.

It was absolutely nuts. Usually, when I drag a vertical scrollbar up and down, the horizontal movement of the mouse doesn't make a difference. I can understand a system that would stop scrolling if the mouse gets too far away. There is absolutely no excuse for jumping back to the initial point when the mouse gets too far away, which is what it did.

Turns out it depends on the widget style, but is not mentioned in any widget style description, nor in the fine manual. Finding the appropriate widget style by trial and error was easy, but I am still annoyed.

That's the problem with the new KDE: lots of configurable stuff and no place to configure it. I mean, having themes is nice and all, but the user should be able to configure anything the theme creator can configure, without having to read a manual on how to create a theme. I much rather quickly choose a theme that seems nice and reconfigure the few things that I don't like than wade though hundreds of themes looking for one that fits my specs the best.

Some things (the color themes, for example) actually work that way, but most don't.

Facebook

Decided to start using Facebook more, and am working on it. I find Facebook to be a rather inconvenient format, but on the other hand it is a useful tool for maintaining an intermittent connection with the people with whom I don't maintain a daily connection by IRC, blogs and email.

Life and summer

It's hot, hot, terribly hot. Except that in the Northeastern US it's even hotter, and when I told my parents that we are having a heat wave my dear mother told me to fuck myself together with the heat wave.

My brains have melted, and I joined Helsinki Seta (I did it as a show of support and then realized they have pretty nice membership discounts on sparkling wine in DTM, and on sex toys), and started considering buying some disk space in Google (for putting my pictures into online Picasa albums), and buying a net connection for my own cellphone (I use the net on the work phone). Now I've just had my fifth shower of the day and am sitting contemplating heat-induced thoughts, such as whether I can get into some pool after hours, and whether it would be nice to be a seal. Seals are not bothered by Liferay and Hibernate problems, and they just lie all day eating sashimi. On the other hand, they don't have internet access, so better not.

Edinburgh pics

Finally put the pictures up. I can especially recommend seals riding on a strange device.

Gay Pride: morons found

Went to see the Pride parade yesterday. No, didn't see the attack on it, but heard that those morons have been found and caught too.

I like watching the Pride parades, and sometimes participating if I happen to wake up early enough, which I didn't. One thing that always makes me wonder, though: every time there is at least several people in it proudly displaying portraits of Che Guevara. I always wonder what kind of moron would bring a portrait of a celebrity homophobe to a Gay Pride parade.

Well, I guess the moron has been found now. I saw 4 people (not in the same group) carrying identical Che Guevara balloons, and when I came a bit closer to one of them, I noticed the text under Che: SKP. This SKP, I assume.

Comment spammers

Does anyone know how to get rid of the damn Chinese-language spammers in the comments? How do they get around the word verification anyway?

Edinburgh

I am back from Edinburgh. General impressions:

- The city is lovely. Now I know where all those gothic buildings in the American horror movies come from.
- It actually is pretty nice, sorry for repeating myself. The contrast between the dark gray gothic buildings and the brightly painted stores on their first floors is in fact quite pleasant.
- The people speak some Germanic language, which can be recognized as English with a bit of effort.
- The people seem quite friendly, and somewhat strangely dressed. There are no cute guys at all (I saw only one, and he spoke Norwegian), but also fewer really ugly ones than in England.
- The tourist attractions are either really expensive or totally free.
- There are several bus companies and each has its own numbering, so 15 Lothian and 15 First are not the same bus route. Unless you live somewhere where you need to use one of the other companies, Lothian is the way to go.
- Traditional Scottish food, at least as sold by the pubs, is something that you eat when all the edible food has been eaten. There are many nice restaurants with normal food, though.
- Scotland is very much behind Finland as a beer country, in the sense that the bars in downtown Helsinki offer a much better selection of beer than the ones in Edinburgh and Glasgow. They do have great selections of whiskey, though, and quite a ot of cocktails.
- Leith was a disappointment.
- Glasgow is not nearly as beautiful as Edinburgh, but has a great cathedral, and the cutest tiniest subway ever.
- The ill-behaved gangs of young people were nowhere to be seen.
- People there really take their football seriously.

Funny moments:

- Breasts stuck in Sir Walter Scott monument.
- Seals riding by on a device that resembled a water bike, but apparently wasn't.
- A military parade and a Gay Pride parade at the same time in the same part of town, with the result that the military had a lot more colorfully dressed guys in skirts than the Gay Pride.

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.

Russians and the sexual market theory

Despite having lived in Russia for 16 years, I don't really know that much about the sexual dynamics there. I belonged to a minority with somewhat different sexual dynamics and was raised to believe that having sex with representatives of the majority would result of too much of a culture clash. (I think I did it just once; it resulted in being caught by the camp staff, so we didn't quite even get to the cultural differences, or to the orgasms for that matter. I've done it with some Russians after leaving Russia, but they were raised abroad and therefore quite different.)

Anyway, the sex life of Russian Russians has always been a mystery to me. Lately I have been reading Russian forums, and the mystery did not solve itself, but rather deepened.

There seems to be a belief there, both among the men and the women, that there are much fewer men than women and that the sex market there is a man's market. This is of course not really the case demographically, at least not until 40, but that's what they seem to believe.

How exactly do they reconcile the idea that you must get a man right now or else you'll run out of them real soon with the idea that of course the man has to pay for the privilege?

On a somewhat-related note: I have met many Russians (ethnic and otherwise) who have told me that they would really like to be me (in the sense of living alone in the city). The Finns and the Americans who express the preference for lone city living tend to - surprise - actually live alone and in the city. Russians express this preference more often than Finns or Americans, but for some reason don't do it that much.

Israel, alternative history, and Helen Thomas

A lot of criticism of Israel makes me wonder about the critics.

One can of course criticize Israel's policies without being antisemitic or otherwise weird. First of all, some of the things that Israel does are either ill-advised or uncivilized and deserve criticism.

Second, even when it does something that does not IMO deserve criticism, as a country that sometimes does uncivilized things under the conditions of dire necessity it still gets criticized by perfectly normal people for perfectly understandable reasons: first of all, it's hard to determine what is necessary from for away, and dire necessity seems to be a lot less dire when it is someone else's, second of all, it's sometimes hard to determine even for Israelis themselves, and third, a lot of people tend to condemn uncivilized actions even when they do believe they were necessary.

(I am not sure what to make of the current events myself; I am not well-versed in the legalities of enforcing a naval blockade, and being both of a somewhat legalistic mindset and uncivilized upbringing, tend to think along the lines of "should've let them into the territorial waters and then summarily drowned the fuckers", which is not an actual advice that I should care to give to Israelis or anyone else.)

What makes me wonder, though, is not that some people disapprove of some of Israel's policies, but that a significant percentage of them (say, a fourth or a third) seems to disapprove of the fact that Israel has any policies at all, or indeed exists. With this kind of Israel's critics any prolonged conversation at all comes to the statement that Israel should never have existed in the first place, a new state created in 1948 (as opposed to its ancient neighbors, I suppose, who were created already in 1922, 1943 and 1946).

Or at least should never have been created where it is now. Last week I talked with a woman who said just that. I asked for her suggestion for a list of better locations; she suggested Uganda, which was indeed mentioned as one possible location at the time. I did not managed to elicit from her whether (and why) she thinks Ugandans would have liked it better than Arabs did, or whether she just thinks it would have gone down better due to Ugandans being poor Black people whom nobody cares about on a continent that has so much trouble that nobody'd pay any attention.

Not that there is anything objectionable in thinking of alternative methods and better places of establishing Israel, if one is engaged in some general talk about alternative history. One should, however, first establish: better for whom: Jews, Arabs, Ugandans, Germans? World peace in general?

In the context of talking about the current politics, however, this statement is quite striking. I can think of many countries that should probably have never been established, either from the point of view of the citizenry or from the point of view of the neighbors, or both; but you almost never hear this argument about any of them besides Israel. Besides, since talking about it now is rather obviously 62 years too late, what I almost always hear behind the "it should have never been established" is "can't we just get rid of it now?"

And sometimes the idea comes out in the open. Last week Helen Thomas, who, mind you, is not a local Ku Klux Klan leader, but a well-known American journalist and a member of the White House Press Corps covering the US Presidents since Eisenhower, has had a few drinks to many on the lawn outside of a White House Jewish heritage event and and said that Israelis should get the hell out of Palestine and go home. Lest anyone should think that she meant that Israelis should get the hell out of Hebron and Bethlehem and go home to Tel Aviv and Haifa, she elaborated that "home" would be in Poland and Germany, and added "and the United States" as an afterthought.

Oh well. I guess I can only wish that Helen Thomas's home always be as pleasant, safe and welcoming as Germany and Poland were for Jews in the decade when Israel was established. I can also hope that the woman herself goes to enjoy her ancestral home in Lebanon someday.

Hmm, Lebanon. Isn't that one of the countries whose Jewish community has in almost all its entirety moved to Israel and everywhere else? I did not see them welcoming Israelis back 3 years ago. Granted, nobody welcomes the guys arriving on the bomber aircraft, but I don't see them having welcomed peaceful Israelis wishing to buy a summer cottage, either, or even to visit as tourists. Or indeed Finnish citizens with an Israeli entry stamp in their passport.

Talking about the alternative history, sometimes I wonder: what would all those alternative history lovers say if Israel actually decided to move somewhere else? Like, the whole Israeli army and the rest of the population suddenly teleporting to Poland or Germany and saying "this used to be our land, move over"? They do have a bigger army than Poland, mind you. The idea of Israelis kicking Poland out of Pomerania, Germany out of Bavaria or Russia out of Saint Petersburg has an interesting sci-fi kind of appeal, just to see what all those people who used to say that Israel should get out of Israel would say.

Go away, uncle Darwin!

I didn't want to comment on the Gaza raid, but there is another ship approaching there now. Called, of all things, Rachel Corrie.

If anyone ever again tells me that the seamen are superstitious, I'll laugh in his/her face. The name just calls for a Darwin award.

Nevertheless I wish the passengers and the crew a safe boarding and very fast journey back home after it.

Progress

Sometimes it feels like I am the only one who believes that the world is actually getting better (not everything in the world, but on average).

I know this is not the case, and that the people who tend to say that the world is going to hell in a handbasket are just understandably more vocal about it. It's probably a healthy phenomenon, too: the people who are unhappy with some changes are making justified noise about those changes.

To me the progress is self-evident: look what a shithole the world was 150 years ago, look what a bigger shithole it was 1500 years ago, etc. The are occasionally some very troubled times and places, that are worse off than the same place was a little earlier, but in general the world is getting better.

There is one thing I am wondering about, though: I have heard many mostly-sensible people say that it was probably not all that bad 200 years ago. I have never heard anyone remotely sensible (this excludes homicidal eco-philosophers) say that it not all that bad that some people live that way now: without clean water, or antibiotics, or other similar trappings of modernity.

First Blood (spoilers)

Saw First Blood for the first time ever. I knew what it was about; what surprised me is that almost all the characters had that single-mindedness normally reserved for the Evil Guy's nameless henchmen.

OK, the protagonist has obvious mental problems. OK, the sheriff liked to be mean to helpless drifters (that kind of people usually tend to back off when the victim turns out to be not so helpless, but let's assume this one was dedicated to being mean). OK, some cops probably hit the uncooperative detainees with only like-minded cops for witnesses.

But a police officer trying to shoot and kill a fugitive? In the presence of a disapproving colleague? And then threatening to kill that same colleague for trying to stop him? While the colleague is piloting the helicopter from which the shooter is sticking out with no safety belt, and only his butt inside?

My contribution to the Everyone Draw Muhammed Day

I totally suck at drawing, so I made a photo collage reflecting my view of the guy.

The best contribution I've seen so far was Iowahawk's (via the Fourth Checkraise).

Misery! Misery! Pain!

Got a flu. Didn't go to a party today, probably not gonna go to a party tomorrow, unfortunately did go to a party-like event yesterday and now feel guilty about infecting everyone.

Blaah. Running out of tissues, too.

It was his own damn fault!

I guess blaming people for their own troubles is a basic human need, along with water, food, sleep, etc. I am not sure where it comes from - probably the wish to distance oneself from the trouble ("the victim has done something unwise, and I won't, therefore it won't happen to me") or take some control over it ("I have done something wrong and shit happened, and I won't do it again and shit won't happen ever again").

Doubtless a lot of people get in trouble after doing a lot of unwise things. Nevertheless some shit just happens without anyone doing anything unwise. More to the point, we tend to judge the risk and wisdom of the actions by the final result.

Decent people tend to suppress the impulse to blame the victim unless either a) the victim's stupidity was somewhere in the Darwin Awards class and the victim is nowhere within hearing range, or b) the blame is in fact constructive, as in telling a person who spends all his/her time at home and bemoans the absence of a sex partner that they should visit some venue where the potential sex partners congregate.

Some people, and some cultures as well, still haven't got the idea. My family keeps yelling at me and each other every time we get a common cold, which is fairly often. My way of dealing with it is not telling them unless it happens when I see them in person; their idea is that the common cold should be avoided by wearing a lot of clothes and avoiding the people who have it, although the former is useless and the latter impossible.

Another interesting case is blaming the woman for going to a man's place and getting raped there. It's very common in Russia, less common in the US and even less in Finland unless the man belonged to some ethnicity overrepresented in rape statistics, but it does exist. The funny thing is in all the three cultures visiting a man at night is considered a fairly normal thing to do if no rape has occurred (well, varies a bit by subculture). By some coincidence I have met many men (and women, but for them I don't have a point of comparison) who blamed women for coming to a man's place and getting raped, but I have never met a man who'd warn me against visiting his place, or inviting him to mine, or showing a slightest surprise or shock at my unwise actions. None of them ever tried anything ungentlemanly, either, unless you count the guy who wanted to talk about Catholicism instead of sex.

Anyway, these thoughts came to me after a recent rape case in Russia: a well-known artist and a friend of his allegedly raped - she has injuries and a witness a 17-year-old student and a whole bunch of people are saying "why did she go to his place, didn't she know what was gonna happen?" I am not sure they are helping his case in court, even in Russia.

The really surreal moment came when during that discussion somebody mentioned a soldier who got raped and maimed by two women, and the reaction was pretty much the same: "what was he thinking, didn't he know what was gonna happen?" Right. Because I am sure young women perform aggravated rape and aggravated battery on careless soldiers all the time.

My other particular favorite is the people who blame the victims of unpredictable natural disasters for being or living there when the disaster happened.

Some people should be castrated three times a day with a rusty chainsaw

Russian scams have become more common in Finland and elsewhere lately. They've been common in Russia for a while now, but I had no reason to know about them. Finnish media doesn't write about them much, or at all, because they are never directed at Finns. It's kind of hard to convince a Finn that his kid has gotten into a car accident and a Russian-speaking police officer would like a bribe. Really, I am surprised even Russians believe it.

During the last few months, and especially the last few days, Russian-speaking people in Finland have received phone calls saying their their son was into a bad car accident in Lithuania and needs a lot of money right fucking now (with a young man screaming for his mom in the background, and other theatrics). They have posted about it on the Russian forum here, which is how I know about it; most of them just laughed it off, because this kind of thing is easy to laugh off when you have no children, or your only child is a daughter, or your son is just in the process of learning to eat baby food.

Today, however, I've heard something beyond all imagination, and not from a forum - from the blog of a real-life friend.

Her elderly parents (in Russia) got a phone call, ostensibly from their local health center, saying that the father's blood test shows he has a very severe case of leukemia. His own doctor could not speak to them because her husband just got murdered; they got transfered from one person to another until they got some famous Kremlin oncologist. They were told that their only hope is an experimental treatment that costs 360 000 rubles (9251 euro).

Luckily they called their daughter, she went to the health center, found out that the test is ok and the doctor and her husband is ok, and the whole thing was a scam, etc.

Just imagine those assholes. Sort of makes me wish that leukemia on the scammers, along with the gangrene of all protruding appendages, castration with a rusty chainsaw and porcupine in the anus.

Racists prefer Ethiopians?

YLE has published an article about different unemployment levels among different immigrant groups. The fact itself is well-known, of course, but they have interviewed Annika Forsander, the Director of Immigration Affairs for the City of Helsinki, who is saying that discrimination is the big reason why Somalis were not able to enter the job market in proper numbers, even the ones who'd lived here for 15-20 years and have degrees. The unemployment rate among the Somali citizens is 55.2%.

I have one question to Forsander: how well can an average racist employer tell a Somali from an Ethiopian? Because I can't. I can for the most part tell people from the Horn of Africa from the people from West Africa, and I figure that an average East African with a Muslim name is more likely to be Somali than Ethiopian, but you can't rely on that, and many of them have weird names anyway.

The racist employers are obviously better anthropologists than yours truly, and consistently discriminate against Somalis more than against the Ethiopians. Somalis' unemployment rate in 55.2%. Ethiopians' is 8.2%. Kenyans' is 4%. People from Ghana and Nigeria have an unemployment rate of 8% and 10%, respectively. Here are the numbers.

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.

Russia has no shame

Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has presented the certificates of Cities of Military Glory to five Russian cities, including Vyborg. (The short English version says "hero cities", but it's a somewhat different concept.)

Anyway, Medvedev said that during the WWII Vyborg has proved that it was worthy of its military history. The Itar-Tass article said that during WWII it was occupied by Germans and Finns, but was liberated by Russian troops in 1944.

I realize of course that any person with either any sense of shame or a shred of common decency is highly unlikely to work for Itar-Tass and is even more unlikely to become the president of Russia, but for fuck's sake! (For those who don't know: Vyborg was a Finnish city, occupied and annexed by Russians in 1940, retaken by Finland in 1941, and reoccupied by Russia in 1944.)

Yeah, I know that many national borders have changed in 1940s, and that nobody really expects to change them back now (except for the kind of folks who keep suggesting that Israel should disband and go Somewhere Else, usually without specifying where that Somewhere Else should be), and that during that time many countries have done things that they are not particularly proud of, but that is obviously not a good reason to be proud of those things.

I also checked out the local Russian forum, and what they had to say on the subject. My reaction to that is unprintable, and shall therefore remain unprinted.

Listen to your heart, or maybe don't

I am rather curious about the contrast of a very strong "listen to your heart"-message in popular culture, and "emotion" being essentially a dirty word in any social or political discourse. Even more interesting is the fact that while calling the other party emotional and oneself logical is very widely practiced, purposeful public displays of emotion also have their place in such discourse.

The proponents of measures that are considered somewhat less humanitarian usually directly accuse their more-humanitarian opponents of a) basing their views on emotion, and not on reason and logic (like us) and b) being women, regardless of whether or not they actually are. The proponents of more humanitarian measures tend to avoid using the very words "emotion" and "feelings" as a swear word, resorting instead to listing the emotions that in their opinion drive the adversary: fear, hatred, etc. (they themselves are of course perfectly logical and reasonable), and also often accuse the opponents of being male and sexually deprived, regardless of their actual gender and sex life.

What do people actually mean when they call somebody else emotional? An intricate emotional life and wide range of emotion? Strong emotion? Tendency to express emotion in public? Tendency to act on emotion without running every new idea through the reasoning facilities? Do they even know themselves?

The funniest moments come when people discuss emotions as a natural and irresistible force: if it's the other people who can't control their emotions to our satisfaction, this means that they are not fit to make decisions, vote, etc. If it's ourselves - why, then we'll call those emotions "human nature" and declare that you can't really go against the human nature, now can you?

Boobquake!

Iranian cleric (Friday prayer leader for the city of Tehran, says Wikipedia) Kazem Sedighi said that immodestly dressed women cause earthquakes.

This does make one wonder why Iran has so many earthquakes - could it be that the Lord's opinion on what is modest and what is not differs quite a lot from that of Iran's leadership? Makes one wonder about Kazem Sedighi's sanity and the recreational pharmaceuticals he uses, too.

Anyway: tomorrow is the day when thousands of women across the world, myself included, will try to prove him wrong by wearing immodest shirts. As of now, the event has 165497 confirmed participants on Facebook.

Imagine our surprise though if the big one hits Iran tomorrow...

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.

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.

Outlander

Started reading Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series (thanks for the tip, Mari!). It's a time-travel story and a sort of a cross between sci-fi, historical fiction and romance. According to the author it was originally meant to be a historical novel, and sci-fi and romance appeared later.

There are in theory eight books; seven have been written so far, and I have read four so far. Every book has its own sensible story arc, so the absence of the last one is not too frustrating.

One thing that I really love about the series is the protagonist who for the most part does not give a flying fuck about history and whether or not she is fucking it up. It's refreshing because of being rather unusual, and is especially fun in contrast with Connie Willis's time-travel novels, where characters are extremely concerned with effects on history.

A tooth and an ear

Last night I broke my tooth on a salt crystal. "Argh, let this be a nightmare", I thought. A couple of hours later it turned out to have been a nightmare, or at least the tooth is not broken. This was the first time ever it has occurred to me in a dream that it might be a dream.

I got up and turned the kettle on. It was making really strange sounds. I took my tea and went to bed with it, hoping that the kettle problem would be a dream, too.

In the morning the kettle problem turned out to be a ear problem. The damn ear feels like there is fluid inside or something, and is sort of oversensitive to some sounds, for example the kettle. Googling turned up that this is a very common aftereffect of a flu and nothing needs to be done, but it's still pretty damn annoying.

It's better now, but not quite gone.

Had a lazy weekend. Visited a friend, did my US taxes, washed the laundry (probably should hang it to dry, too, or else not gonna have any pants in the morning) and read a book.

Argentina: food

We were told they eat meat, and they sure do! There are delicious steaks to be had everywhere, for about 8-12 euro. The best bet is just to order "bife de lomo" everywhere. Potatoes and suchlike often have to be ordered separately.

in Patagonia they have Patagonian lamb (I can especially recommend the one in the restaurant called Las Barricas). In Iguazu they have the traditional local fish (surubi, dorado and pacu). The only reason it became traditional is probably because they didn't have anywhere to put cows to pasture, or any better fish. Avoid if possible. They do also have salmon and steelhead trout, so the fish lovers are not totally fucked.

The have quite a lot of sushi places, I even saw a kosher sushi place in Buenos Aires. My one and only attempt at sushi revealed that the restaurant only had four kinds of fish: salmon, tuna, shrimp and an unidentified white-colored fish. They did a very good job out of it, much better than I could ever imagine anyone doing, but I decided to leave sushi at that.

Anything sweet either looks very suspicious or contains a lot of dulce de leche. I happen to like the stuff; if you don't, Argentinian pastry is probably not for you.

Finding the wine to our liking was a challenge at first; later we fould a producer we liked a lot, Luigi Bosca. Among local beers, El Bolson totally rules.

They make good coffee. Really good coffee, though in all my travels i still haven't found anyone who'd brew coffee as good as the guy near the big market in Istanbul.

There is a local specialty called cappuccino italiano. That's as opposed to the regular cappuccino, although occasionally you ask for regular and get italiano. It's cappuccino with cream (in addition to milk), cocoa and cinnamon, which makes for a surprisingly pleasant combination.

Ice cream in pretty good. Normally I like coffee, caramel and green tea flavors, but in Argentina they make very good ice cream flavored with strawberry, raspberry and other berries, often combined with mascarpone. I think their secret is that they put enough berries in there.

More about Argentina

Our first experience of Argentina was an immigration official looking at my parents' US passports, noticing their birthplace in Russia, and asking "do you happen to have a Russian passport as well? If you do I won't have to charge you the entrance fee."

They didn't, and paid. I used my Finnish passport, and didn't have to pay. When it was time to fly back, the airline clerk instructed me to show both passports to her, the Finnish one to the Argentina border control, and the US passport to the US border control. (Incidentally, I passed the US border control in Miami, for the first time ever, and was absolutely shocked by the Customs and USDA officials addressing me in Spanish. They did switch to English as soon as they noticed my open mouth.)

The combination of high-trust and low-trust features in Argentina is sort of strange. On one hand, locks, bars (not just the drinking establishments) and guards are everywhere. On the other hand, the population, including lone young women, does not seem to be in any way afraid of being out at 4am. On one hand, any bill starting from 50 peso (about 10 euro) up is checked for being counterfeit by its recipient, and even fairly small credit card purchases often require a picture ID. On the other hand, nobody has ever tried to cheat us in a restaurant.

The people are friendly, laid-back, and mostly southern European in appearance. They are also covered with liver spots in a way that I found scary, and to a much higher degree than in Southern Europe, which made me wonder whether Buenos was much sunnier than, say, the south of Spain, or the sunscreen much less popular.

I really loved the way they tried to correct my Spanish, and started thinking that if I lived there for several months I would be fluent. Once I tried to find matches in a supermarket, and having failed in the attempt to find them by myself, asked an employee for cerillas. He led me where the damn things were, pointed at them, and said in Spanish in a schoolteacher tone: "Fosforos. Only Bolivians say cerillas."

Argentinians seem to love demonstrations, dogs and traveling. We'd seen at least 10 demonstrations in about 8 days in Buenos Aires, mostly on various political topics: they supported some party or other, demonstrated against paying of the national debt, in favor of recapturing the Falkland islands "because our brothers' blood is priceless!" (somebody should explain them the concept of sunk costs), and against drugs. Every self-respecting demonstration had drums, and people who beat them with a big stick and a great enthusiasm, and demonstrations seemed to compete among themselves in how much noise they could create. The only exception was a rather sinister-looking demonstration of people in Che Guevara t-shirts with evil-looking faces, who had very big sticks and no drums at all.

There is a great number of dogs, who are just as laid-back as humans. The city was full of people walking dogs, people walking as many as 10 dogs at a time, and a great number of dogs without any visible people present, who nevertheless did not seem to be strays. Picking up the dog shit from the streets is not common, and one should exercise due caution while walking.

The national parks were full of tourists, most of whom were from Argentina. There was quite a lot of people from the other South American countries, too. The parks usually have different prices for Argentinians, people from the local province, people from the local town, people from Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay) and all others.

Another interesting feature of the national parks was the languages: posted notices tended to be in Spanish, English, Portuguese and Hebrew.

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.

Argentina

Just got back from my first trip to Latin America, which (the trip, not Latin America) consisted mostly of various parts of Argentina.

It's a damn big country, incidentally. My mother's packing advice was along the lines of "pack for the moderate climate, the glaciers, the rainforest and don't pack too much".

The first words that came to my mind upon seeing Buenos Aires were "old-world charm", which was strange, because I have never seen any in the old world. Or rather there is quite a lot of charm in the old world, but none of the kind that I have ever felt like calling old-world charm.

The second words were "that's fucking huge". Buenos Aires has some streets that are so huge that they have to be seen to be believed.

I expected Argentina to be a reasonably civilized third-world country, but it didn't feel particularly third-worldly to me. The general impression is similar to that of a poorer Western European country, for example Portugal. Nowhere where we'd been was in any way scary (we did not seek out slums, but we weren't careful of where we were going, either), tap water was drinkable though not tasty, the restaurant bills did not have any mysterious extra items, and there were fewer beggars than in Prague, or in fact fewer beggars than in Helsinki after Romania joined the EU. The general impression of Argentina was way more civilized than that of Hungary or Czech republic.

More later.

Don't shave and drive

In particular, don't shave your pussy and drive. Not only do you get into an accident, you are probably left with half of your pussy covered in stubble.

Megan Barnes decided to shave her pussy while driving, the next day after having her license suspended for 5 years. Judging from the picture we should be grateful she didn't decide to color her roots, too.

People for Ethical Treatment of PETA, anyone?

Remember Knut, the polar bear rejected by his mother in Germany 3 years ago? At that time Frank Albrecht, Germany's PETA's zoo expert, said that the bear should be killed, because "the zoo must follow the instincts of nature". Later he changed his statement to "should have been allowed to die".

It would be a nice cheap shot to say that over there they have had a bit of a problem with ethics during the last century, but in fact the German people are absolutely not to blame: the zoo told PETA to bugger off, the locals held pickets in favor of saving the bear, and the bear was saved.

Apparently Frank Albrecht is not done with Knut yet: now he wants him castrated. Because Knut has to share his living space with his female cousin, and "any offspring would threaten the genetic diversity of the polar bear population in Germany and risk susceptibility to a condition known as "incest depression"".

Excuse me? Did I hear it right? "Genetic diversity of the polar bear population in Germany"? Germany has a polar bear population? Of a size that makes the concept of genetic diversity meaningful? Incest causes depression in polar bears? What color is the sky on Mr. Albrecht's planet? I am not asking whether he comes in peace, because he obviously doesn't.

(OK, I realize that he probably meant inbreeding depression.)

Oh well. In 2003 some Jews were angry when PETA protested a Palestinian suicide bombing in Jerusalem where a live donkey (thereafter a dead donkey) was used, but didn't protest the killing of Jews. My dear fellow Jews: shut the fuck up and don't give PETA any ideas. I for one am really glad that they are sticking to animals. Do you really want these lunatics to start fighting for the ethical treatment of Jews? Sheesh, I wouldn't wish them and their ethical treatment even on Palestinians, or for that matter on any other nation where people mate with their cousins, threaten the genetic diversity, and cause incest depression.

Mr. Arbrecht: I've heard that cutting somebody's balls off might cause depression as well. Do try it out on yourself first before advocating it for Knut.

What do you call a country where one can have and enforce Nuremberg laws?

Canada.

Imagine a place declaring that to be considered sufficiently racially pure to live there one has to have N great-grandparents of a certain ethnicity. Imagine them forbidding the marriages between the pure ones and outsiders, and evicting the impure ones, including the spouses and the partners of the racially pure, and their adopted children.

The Kahnawake Mohawk territory in Quebec has decided to do exactly that. The people adopted before the enactment of the law (2003) or married to a member before 1981 can apply to be a non-member resident. The people married into the community after 1981 get kicked out. People adopted after the enactment of the law get kicked out upon turning 18. The law of 2003 also suspends the membership of those who are married to non-Aryans, I mean non-Mohawks, but AFAIK they haven't actually enforced it.

From what I gather from the media, the law (or custom) of kicking out the spouses with insufficient "blood quantum" has existed for a long time, but the enforcement is sporadic, as in they kick out the spouses of their residents every few years and now seems to be the time. They are really liberal, too, giving the people a whole ten days to leave their homes.

"We don't consider ourselves Canadians," says the Grand Chief Mike Delisle. "Maybe this is the first step in terms of informing the community how we're going to move forward in that direction." I wonder what would be the second step - refuse any money coming from the Canadian taxpayers, I am sure.

The really funny thing is that Alvin Delisle, one of the previous chiefs, who used to enforce and support this law when he was a chief, has now become a traitor to the race and is living with a non-Mohawk woman. And guess what - he's had a change of heart now, and he is going to challenge the expulsion of his partner as a Canadian human-rights violation.

"Just because I'm a Mohawk doesn't exclude me from the Charter," he says. "I'm still Canadian. And I think this is an injustice. It's a racial slur."

Right. It's a racial slur and injustice when it is done to you. When you were doing it to others it was totally for the protection of Mohawk blood and Mohawk honor. Oh well, as far as seeing the light goes, I guess better late than never.

His girlfriend wishes to stay, saying that since they are both in their 60s they are not gonna have any children and thus pose a threat to Mohawk survival.

One thing I didn't find in the media: can Canada count the money spent on this community as development aid? Isn't that what you call the money that you send to places with human rights problems?

Benefit to society

I was taking part in a conversation about smokers and how much their diseases cost the society.

For the record, I don't agree that the mere fact of having public health care should oblige everyone to be on their best behavior, healthwise. For one thing, almost nobody ever really is, and the whole thing is just an occasion to complain about other people's sins. Everybody wants to tax the neighbor's unhealthy behavior, and starts complaining about health fascism when somebody is trying to tax their own. (Well, not strictly everybody - demanding taxes on unhealthy behavior is the habit of a certain kind of people - the kind who want to tax traditional sin, such as alcohol, tobacco, and sometimes unhealthy food, whatever that is supposed to mean. I have never seen them demand taxes on dangerous sports, suicide attempts, or giving birth to genetically suboptimal children when a genetic problem is known in advance. Ugh, maybe I shouldn't give them ideas.)

But I digress. The conversation was mostly between people who seemed to believe that one does in fact have an obligation, and part of them pointed out that smokers don't really cost all that much to society, because they die younger.

I've heard this argument many times before. it always makes me shudder to think that in many otherwise normal people's minds, the concepts of "benefit to society" and "cost to society" do not, in fact, include years of life of its members.

Blaah

Kind of tired, stressed out and unwell, despite the fact that everything is fine, work is not being stressful right now, I am not physically sick, there is nothing stressful going on in my private life, nothing is wrong and the people who broke the window did fix it.

I think this winter is just getting to me. Want summer now.

All the people I should have contacted lately but didn't: I am sorry.

My life is not like the lives of other people, part 2

On the way home my panties suddenly fell down. Or at least as down as they can go within my jeans. It was very sudden, very uncomfortable and against all laws of physics and man.

I live in one of those inner-city buildings with a small enclosed yard that has nothing except pavement and trash bins. The first floor is wider than the rest of the building, and if I open my window, which is currently not a good idea, I can walk on the roof of the first-floor hall. Except that there was more than half a meter of snow there in the morning. Both this roof and the roof of the building have a lot of ice hanging off it. I remember taking the trash out yesterday and vaguely wondering when are they gonna clean the roof and whether anyone is gonna be killed before that. Or during.

The answer to the first question came to my mind as soon as I walked through the gate. There was a portable red fence. They had in fact cleaned the roof, and now there is a fucking iceberg in our backyard. We can't get into our yard to get to the trash cans. The trash collector cannot get to the trash cans. And I have no idea what else is coming from the roof, but it can't be good.

When I came into my living room I noticed snow between the windows and figured the pressure of snow has opened the outer window. When I came closer I realized that the building caretaking company has in its infinite wisdom dropped all the ice from the upper roof to the lower roof, and one of the huge pieces of ice came through my window.

Now I have:

- a broken window,
- two big tables with computer hardware in front of the window that need to be moved in order for anyone to get to the window,
- a pile of stuff in front of the tables, that will have to be moved first,
- a pile of snow about a meter high pushing on the window from outside, and likely to fall into my living room if anyone tries to open the window,
- no access to the window or the pile of snow from the outside, because of no access to the inner yard,
- a double headache from having to deal with it both as the apartment owner and a member of the board of the building,
- some fragrant trash at home, and no garbage collection,
- a software deployment at 6:30 in the morning, and a very minor surgery at 8.

I am so pissed. When I find the morons who did that, I am not just gonna rip then a second asshole. They will cry and wish that I stopped at the second while I am ripping them the 284th. I will castrate every one of them and give them a bleach enema, and then strangle them with the remains of their own bowels. And then I'll show the judge what they'd done, and walk free.

The car

I kind of bought a car. Or rather a third of a car. It's nice to have a car every once in a while, but I don't have any daily use for it.

I promised my dear parents not to start driving it on snow and ice, what with having had a long break from driving, and having never had a rear-wheel drive car. Somehow, though, I managed to do exactly that, and due to natural lack of common sense I even mentioned it to them. Eek.

Anyway, I kinda like driving. It's parking that I hate. With a passion. Not even the parallel-park part, even though my parallel-parking skills appear to have rusted a bit. It's looking for a damn parking spot in the first place that I really hate. And looking. And looking. And finding, and then realizing that it's too small. And looking again. And finding, and parking, and getting stuck in the snow. And being unable to get in or out. And trying to get out and realizing that I can't open the drivers' door because of the snow. And climbing out of the passenger door, insulting the door, the snow and their mothers, and shoveling the snow from under the wheels. And finding another spot, 4 blocks away, and wondering about carrying 200 kilos of Lundia for 4 blocks. And then wondering about what the hell the the "I" parking permit, which I certainly do not have, and do I really have to move it somewhere by 9am, and where?

I've always wondered about people who equate a car with freedom. I can understand it in rural areas, but I've also met them in Helsinki. For me, freedom of movement is that I go to a bus stop without looking at the schedule, and immediately a bus shows up. A car is the opposite of freedom - it's more like a very demanding pet, who needs to be fed, taken to a vet, and kept in appropriate places.

However, just like many pets, it's quite a lot of fun.

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.

Let's ban driving in bars

It's strange to see how many opponents of the restaurant smoking ban like to refer to cars and their exhaust as an example of other people being allowed to pollute air. So far I have never seen a running car in a restaurant or in a bar.

Life, whee!

Starting to have a life again, which is nice. Been to two game sessions this week, and visited friends with cats twice, and am still able to breathe after that. Also found that sleep thing, which some people substitute for coffee.

It's still cold and snowing. Can somebody please stop the Ice Age?

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!

Massachusetts is really running out of jurors

I understand that a cat can be summoned for jury duty sometimes. Shit happens.

What I want to know is how come the jury commissioner denied the disqualification. You do have to be a US citizen, at least 18 years of age and able to understand and speak English in order to serve on a jury in Massachusetts; one would expect that this excludes most cats.

Sick

Haven't been posting for a while on account of a really annoying bronchitis, and also because my home is currently a disaster area that needs to be cleaned and rearranged (the cause of the disaster were new bookshelves).

I am, of course, in no condition for cleaning, posting or even sleeping, but tea and antibiotics are slowly winning.

For the entertainment of my readers, an example of why one shouldn't hotlink (warning: goatse).

EDIT: The person who hotlinked to my picture noticed the goatse image and replaced it with a picture of two Israelis in uniform trying to drag an Orthodox Jewish boy somewhere, which is a strange choice of picture considering their topic. It is not known whether he (the hotlinker, not the boy in the picture) has benefited from the experience.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, everyone!

Feeling a little bit hung over. Probably should make my traditional New Year salad.

Security measures

I often feel sorry for TSA and the Homeland Security Department. When they are trying hard and nothing happens, everyone makes fun of them for so much futile effort. When they miss something, everyone is angry at them for that.

This time around they really sound a bit strange, because they are doing both of the above. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's father says he has warned many people, including the US embassy. TSA says they didn't have enough evidence to put him on the no-fly list. This have never stopped them before from putting babies and US Senators on that list, but fair enough - maybe they really improved their ways and don't put people on that list without proper evidence, what with being unable to fly being a rather major inconvenience.

We do, however, also have a list people who should be subjected to extra searches and extra questioning. Was he on this list? If not, why not?

The pantybomber was on the UK no-fly list, which is really the UK no-enter list (they are allowed to transit to UK airports but not to enter the country).

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that "the system worked".

Excuse me? Worked? I feel so safe knowing that our system's necessary components include having bad detonators, inept terrorists, and brave Dutch filmmakers sitting in their immediate vicinity.

Happy end is not the same thing as "the system worked". Sometimes it just means the terrorists were not all that bright, and the bystanders happened to have a lot of courage and good reflexes.

Anyway, the new measures include having everyone sit in their seats for the last hour of the flight (AFAIK only in the US, but those things tend to spread around), and having all the luggage in the overhead bins during the same time. Yes, it does mean that you can't have a book, a mp3 player or a blanket. And no, I don't know why only the last hour, but best not to give them any ideas.

The new security measures have already born fruit: they arrested another Nigerian guy on another Amsterdam to Detroit flight, for failing to vacate the toilet when ordered. At first they suspected him of being a terrorist, but then it turned out that he was using the toilet for a much more mundane reason, undoubtedly after sampling a wide selection of Northwest or KLM food.

I am sure all the chronic diarrhea sufferers will thank the pantybomber as they sit in the planes clenching their buttocks and praying for the big white porcelain deliverance. At least they have something they can appropriately deposit on his grave. After he gets one.

The news of the peaceful

A Nigerian man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight going from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas day. He tried to repeat the feat of Richard Reid, and in fact had, failing to blow up the airplane and getting caught. Unlike Reid, who used shoes and failed the igniting part, Abdulmutallab actually managed to set a bomb in his lap on fire, and only the passengers' and crew vigilance and subsequent beating the living shit out of him saved the plane.

We still do not know whether he has grilled his nuts enough to make this officially eligible for a Darwin award submission, but this is not really essential for the gene pool, since his only potential sex partner from now on is likely to be Richard Reid. At least they have a lot in common, testicles or not.

There is a story making rounds in the press that the man is the son of Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, the recently retired chairman of the First Bank of Nigeria. Damn, the story is starting to sound like a Nigerian spam letter already.

God knows what poverty can drive people to.

Today I saw the term "joulurauhan uskonto" somewhere. Unfortunately I have no idea who to attribute it to.

The aviation authorities have responded by banning cabin luggage for the last hour of the flight (meaning that one hour before landing you put all your stuff in the overhead bin and just sit there for an hour without a book or a player, wishing a thousand painful deaths on Abdulmutallab). Oh well, we should probably be grateful be did not stick explosives up his ass.

In much more amusing news: Abdullah Tammi, the founder and the former chairman of the Islamic Party of Finland, resigned last week due to his taking stand against terrorism. He decided to found his own party, the Party of Socialist Peace.

I wish I could say something funny about this, but I really can't make it sound any funnier than it already does.

The Great Infidel Holiday is upon us again

Merry Christmas!

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.

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Open relationships and celebrities

The whole Tiger Woods scandal made me wonder:

Why do so few celebrities negotiate themselves an open relationship? OK, some of them might be in love with someone special who doesn't agree to it, but what's up with the rest?

I know that open relationships are not for everyone, of course. I also know that monogamy is so much of an assumption in our culture that even most of the people who'd prefer an open relationship probably do not raise the subject with their partners.

Somebody like Tiger Woods, however, has more than enough sexual market value to negotiate himself an open relationship should he want one. He didn't, however.

For a while I wondered whether an open relationship would be a scandal as such, and whether this is the reason it is so uncommon among the celebrities. Guess not. I had to turn to Wikipedia to see if there are any celebrity couples in open marriages (more recent than Sartre and de Beauvoir). Yes, there are. Very few. I don't remember any of them being any kind of public scandal.

So, what prevents the guys who want to have sex with a lot of women and have the means to do so from finding wives who'd let them do so without any scandal?

The worst drinking game ever

A friend of my mom's, herself a Russian-born woman, once said "I'd believe anything they'd say about Russia, even if they say that nowadays bears eat people in the streets". The longer I live the more I realize how right she was.

I keep following the story of the Lame Horse nightclub that burned down in Perm almost two weeks ago. If the story were a movie, I would laugh at it as unrealistic.

Unfortunately it's not a movie, it's a horrible human tragedy. None of those people deserved to die there, not even the owner.

Inevitably, though, for the people who did know anyone involved the sense of tragedy slowly dissipates, and the whole thing starts resembling a drinking game. Drink once for every official who got fired afterwards, drink twice for every violation the club committed, drink three times for every person crimilally charged... Drink once for every firework whose instructions were not read because they were in Chinese, drink twice for every firework whose instructions were in Russian and said "for outdoor use only" that got used inside nevertheless.

The findings, so far (might change as the investigation proceeds):

- The club was on the first floor of an apartment building. The premises were owned by the Ministry of Defense, and rented out illegally.
- On the paper, the place was a cafe for 50 persons, with an area of 460 m² and huge windows. In reality it held 400 people on the most crowded nights (which the fire night luckily wasn't), had no windows to speak of and was 660 m². The extra 200 m² appeared and the windows disappeared when they moved and rebuilt the wall. Nobody admits having ever received any rent for the extra square footage, or metrage, and none of the inspectors noticed it.
- Emergency exits? We don't need any fucking emergency exits! We have those huge windows, just look at this paper! (OK, there was one unmarked extra exit that only the staff knew about.)
- The first fire inspection paper was signed in 2003 by a person who got fired from the position of a fire inspector in 2002.
- The ceiling was made of twigs and highly flammable polystyrene that was so poisonous that it took people a couple of breaths to pass out.
- The wiring was under the polystyrene, so the lights immediately went out. Emergency lights? What's that?
- Most employees were not officially working there.
- Come to think of it, the place didn't really exist, at least not as far as the tax office was concerned.
- The police who were investigating where the fireworks came from found 700 cubic meters of fireworks in a plastics factory in Chelyabinsk, where they were stored without any fire safety measures. They also believe that 120 tons of fireworks are being stored in a research center called "Geodesy" in a Moscow suburb, and that this is where the nightclub fireworks came from. They'd like to test this hypothesis, but the research center police is not letting them in. The research center in fact happens to be an artillery range and has nothing to do with any geodesy.

Stop it, I can't drink that much.

Evil Eclipse and voodoo programming

My Eclipse (currently run in Ubuntu Karmic, but the problems started earlier) has been having some nasty problems for a while now. Quite weird really, boxes were not responding to the OK button, new software sources were not being added, you could commit stuff to SVN but not tag it, etc.

Turns out it's due to changes in GTK+, and can be completely cured by saying export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true before starting Eclipse.

It just feels so much like learning a magic spell in a roleplaying game.

You know the world economy is in crisis when...

...even the terrorists can afford to discriminate.

Five Americans tried to join several terrorist groups in Pakistan, but were rejected by Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Jaish-e-Muhammed for being foreigners without sufficient references.

Sheesh. Where is this world going with such discrimination against foreign labor?

Anyway, now Ramy Zamzam, Umar Farooq, Waqar Khan, Ahmad Mini, and Aman Hassan Yemer (See? See? Not a single Muhammed! Take that, Mark Steyn!) have been arrested and are being questioned by the US security officials.

Could be worse, of course. You know that the economy is really fucked when they start demanding 10 years of experience from people applying to be suicide bombers.

No, we don't have campfires indoors

There was a horrible fire in a nightclub in Perm. 112 people are dead, out of about 250 people present; considering the injuries of the survivors, the death toll is likely to rise.

There is a lot of soul-searching in the Russian forums right now. Russians are corrupt, and not particularly safety-minded, and well aware of it, but they are not sure what to do about it: they are not all corrupt, of course, not even the majority, but it only takes a few percent of the population to make it possible for everyone who wants to bribe a fire safety inspector to find a bribable one. A few more percent, and the honest people stop choosing the professions where a lot of people take bribes. One can resist giving bribes, but in many cases it's not an option.

I kind of wish I knew how much the fire inspectors got in this case. To begin with, the club was on the first floor of an apartment building. Its ceiling was quite low (2.5 meters or so) and made of straw and dry twigs. Behind the twigs they had a highly flammable sort of polystyrene and lots of electrical wiring. Just the place for the indoor fireworks. The fireworks turned out to be bigger and hotter than specified, the place had only one emergency exit, and it was unmarked, and all the light worked from the wiring in the ceiling, so as soon at it caught fire the lights went out. And of course there were no sprinklers or fire alarm.

Well, they promised that the evening would be unforgettable, and it sure was. :(

But enough of the Russian fire safety enforcement. Shit happens everywhere. 6 years ago there was a very similar fire in Rhode Island. There the fire inspectors were not bribed but happened to overlook the absence of sprinklers anyway. The company that delivered the insulation materials forgot to mention they were flammable, and the emergency exits were all there, but apparently during such situations people tend to run back where they came from. The survival percentage was much higher than in Perm, of course, but still, 100 people died.

What I really want to know is: considering that almost all the big nightclub fires around the world lately come from the indoor use of fireworks, what exactly possesses people to continue using them? How many people really want to see fireworks during an indoor show? Those events have sufficiently bad air as it is. The whole thing makes me feel like explaining to people "no, we don't have campfires indoors".

It just seems like such a fucking bad idea.

Happy Independence Day, Finland!

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

And now for some statistics

Decided to check out the statistics on crime vs. race in the US cities. While doing so picked up some interesting trivia, and added more stuff to the table (nativity, language, education, median household income and poverty rate).

There are 34 cities with more than half a million population in the US. One of them, Chicago, still hasn't learned to calculate its crime rate, so I didn't include it.

I was not sure whether to count hispanics separately, as used to be traditional, or together with whatever race they actually are, so I did both, like the US Census Bureau. The population data come from the American Community Survey, which is a survey they do to complement the data between the censuses. For one city, Louisville, I had to make up the numbers of non-hispanic whites, because it wasn't available, but it was easy and correct to about one percentage point, because they don't really have almost any hispanics there.

The crime data are FBI's for 2007. The numbers are crime rates for 100000 people.

The table is sortable.

I'll write more comments later, but here are the first few:

- The first thing that surprised me was how few people claim to be of two or more races, in comparison with what you see in the streets. Except in Honolulu, where they don't seem to care.

- I'd known that there is a negative correlation between the number of hispanics and the violent crime rate, but I didn't realize it was that strong.

- The correlation between the percentage of people below the poverty line and violent crime is not nearly as strong as I expected.

- Some things are kind of obvious: the positive correlation between number of blacks and crime is well known, and the negative correlation between the number of immigrants and crime rates is understandable too: you come to the US, you wanna move somewhere nice, as opposed to Detroit. Some things are quite interesting, though: for example Louisville is much poorer than Boston, much blacker, and very much less educated, yet much safer. El Paso is a very poor, very hispanic and very safe city.

- It's interesting that the cities with a non-hispanic white majority tend towards the middle of the table when ranked by safety.

The true you

The previous post reminded me of Mr Halpern, one of our English teachers. He was a passionate man of the kind that want you to be your real self and do whatever you really want, and inform you exactly what it is.

Some of the teachers who are that way want you to agree with them, others want you to argue with them, and both types want you to pretend not to care what they want. He was just one of the really difficult ones who wanted different things on different days, and I am not much of a mind reader.

It's annoying enough when people try to raise your class consciousness, but at least most of them have the sense to do it in more general terms, for example talking about "most X" rather than "you". "Most women only wax their legs because of the society's pressure," that kind of thing. I have no idea whether or not this is the case, for all I know it might be. Personally, I kinda like waxed legs. Like them on men, too, even though the society seems to be failing with the pressure here.

None of that weaselly "most" stuff for our Mr Halpern. He was dealing in "everybody", "nobody" and "you". And simultaneously, mind, wanted me to be true me.

The true me did in fact know what she wanted to do, but it was illegal in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and likely to result in suspension and bad grades, so I didn't. So I just sat there listening to how nobody really likes ice cream in cups (he believed that deep in their hearts everyone prefers cones and cups are just society's pressure) and counted days to the end of the semester.

Natural beauty, in the world of the differently sane

First of all, a disclaimer: this story has not been confirmed in any official way. It was told in an online community by a member in good standing who did not appear to be lying. But you never know. But what the hell, I just want to comment on it here, and who is to say I can't? It's too funny to be true, and too funny to be fake.

Anyway, the girl is a high school student in a small New England town. They had an English project: give up three hair styling products and makeup for a week, and write about it afterwards. Of course the three products have to be something you'd normally use, and the teacher insisted that they really should give them up.

Just for the record, I oppose such projects on general principle. School should not intrude on one's own life in such a way. If it's the text they want, they should be satisfied with a fictional account of giving up those products; if they want authenticity, the paper on "why I really didn't want to give up my styling products" should be just as good as "how I felt when I gave up my styling products for a week".

And then there is one more very obvious problem: not everyone has three styling products to give up. I fact I suspect most people don't, although the girl thinks otherwise. And the task specified that you can't give up showering, shampoo or conditioner, which leaves me - and the girl of this story - with exactly 0 styling products.

(Yes, there are boys in that class. They were allowed to give up shaving instead. Girls were allowed it to, but strongly discouraged from doing so because, according to the teacher, it's disgusting. The girl in question doesn't shave anyway.)

Now, common sense and teachers are not necessarily compatible, which I knew at that age but the girl definitely doesn't, and if it were me there instead of her, I would quietly write a paper about the whatever three products I managed to google or look up in a drugstore, how at first I felt uncomfortable without them but then I found the power of the beauty within, yadda, yadda, yadda. (Thanks, Mr. Halpern, for demanding spontaneity and sincerity and telling us what exactly our spontaneity and sincerity should be.) If the teacher were someone I were actually comfortable with, I would have handed him or her the bullshit paper and the authentic one too, which would have been something along the lines of "gave up shampoo and conditioner for a week; nobody noticed anything unusual, least of all myself".

The purpose of the exercise, after all, is to make the girls see that they don't need all that to be beautiful, and to teach them about the beauty of the natural body. (According to the teacher, that is.) Leaving aside the concept of beauty and the question of what styling products actually contribute to it, it seems rather obvious to me that the people who don't use the products anyway have already figured out that they can do without and don't need a project to make this message sink in.

The girl, however, turned out to be not nearly as cynical as I was at her age, and decided to tell the teacher that she does not use any styling products. It was all downhill from there:

- the teacher sent the girl for a mental evaluation,
- then she sent her to the school office for "improper hygiene",
- then she told the girl that she can have 50% of the points for the assignment of she gives up combing her hair, but that she'd like to see a "drastic change" (the girl is considering using hairspray to induce said drastic change),
- but she is gonna take some points off for lying, because she just doesn't really believe that the girl doesn't blow-dry her hair.

Now, if it just me, or is this teacher pretty much the last person in the world who should instruct anyone on the wonders of natural beauty?

The most amazing thing is that the girl (and apparently the teacher) lives about thirty miles from where I lived when I was in high school. Aliens truly do live among us.

Universal values

The Swiss have voted to ban construction of minarets. The Secretary General of the Organisation of The Islamic Conference, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, said that the ban was "an unfortunate development that would tarnish the image of Switzerland as a country upholding respect for diversity, freedom of religion and human rights and also as a recent example of growing anti-Islamic incitements in Europe by the extremist, anti-immigrant, xenophobic, racist, scare-mongering ultra-right politicians who reign over common sense, wisdom and universal values".

Universal values? Universal fucking values? This is the organisation that, twenty years ago, figured that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights wasn't good enough, or Islamic enough, and produced a competing document, whose first article starts "All human beings form one family whose members are united by submission to God and descent from Adam," ends "the Islamic Shari'ah is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification of any of the articles of this Declaration.", and has such pearls of wisdom as "everyone shall have the right to express his opinion freely in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the Shari'ah."

Guys, can you make up your mind as to whether we have any universal values or not?