How the West was Lost

The Swedish right-wing government (which I made the grand mistake of voting for, next time I might as well vote for Godzilla) has decided that giving some people the right to play police is a great idea. This is called IPRED. We are not talking about guards or bouncers or anything. No, the music and film industries. Through handing a court "proof" (a screenshot saying "person X is downloading file Y") of copyright infringement (often referred to as "theft" because it sounds much worse) the enterprising industry representative can obtain the IP address of a supposed copyright infringer (often referred to as a "pirate" because it sounds like they plunder, rape and kill people) from an ISP. No police involved, no real investigation, no demand for actual proof. The industry representative can then send extortion letters to the supposed copyright infringer, just like they already do in many countries all over the world. The person might be guilty or innocent (victim of a hacker, another family member did it, the industry representative made a mistake/doctored the "evidence"), but that need not matter. If the industry representative sets the extortion amount just right, it will be comparatively financially preferable for the supposed copyright infringer to pay up, given the risk of high lawyer costs and great expenditure of time otherwise.

This is insane.

More subtly, this can be used by someone who wishes to find out the identity of someone else on the Internet. Simply pose as an industry representative (or find a real one to do the work for you) and doctor some evidence. Voila! You get their personal information, social security number and what not.

This is insane.

Combined with the FRA law which is perverse, sickening and fascist, I am wondering exactly what the fucking hell these politicians are aiming for. Are they evil or stupid? Which is worse?

The "reasoning" behind IPRED is that the poor authors need to be given adequate compensation for their work. Bullshit. It is another way to completely erode privacy and put power in the hand of not only private corporations, but the most meaningless of all private corporations, bringing such deadweight losses to society that they could sink small islands.

Though, the justification for the FRA law was even worse. It was passed because TERRORISM might otherwise be all over us like a burning poison blanket over a puppy dog with a limp, and thus we must be the vanguard of draconian oppression. Never mind that Sweden has been the victim of terrorism... never. You could argue about the event when the ship Amalthea was bombed in 1908 by anarchists, killing a grand total of one person, though, but that hardly seems like a good reason for a thoroughly horrible panopticon law a century later.


I have never been a foaming-at-the-mouth patriot, but I have always liked my country. Now I am mostly just ashamed.

State of the Union on the Far Side of the Sea

Some political commentary: I believe Obama winning might have been good. Not necessarily because he is a better person with better politics than McCain. I know too little to comment on that, except that I believe his protectionist ideas suck. Since Obama is a supporter of the death penalty, I am sad to say that I still cannot see the US as a civilized country (that goes for you too, Japan!). Civilized countries do not kill their citizens. Especially not citizens like Timothy McVeigh who might well have been withholding important information that could, perhaps, have been extracted at a later date. Oh, and the innocent, you should not execute the innocent.

China having the death penalty I can understand, the country is slowly developing into an industrialized superpower, but you cannot change the mentality of the people, or the rulers, in just a few years. The US is another story, having reintroduced a death penalty once abolished, torturing prisoners, letting cults have a field day (and field decades), et cetera. However, I hope the regression into barbarism will stop soon, preferably with Obama.

What is the deal with Obama constantly being referred to as "black", by the way? If he has a white mother, how can he be black? Are blacks somehow a genetically dominant race, much like brown eyes? Either way I think it could be a very good thing that the president is not always a white male. I actually did some sort of test online at Harvard University a while ago, to see if I was a bit of a racist without knowing it. It turned out I had no preference at all between white people and black people (not sexual preference, that is, just some general sort of preferencishness). Yay for me, I guess. I also did the test with obese versus normal people. I apparently had a very strong preference for normal people as compared to obese. And I had no preference between heterosexuals and homosexuals. No surprises there. Really fat people should diet to avoid diabetes and oozing over into my seat on the bus. Gay people should be happy just like the rest of us. The test took some time to do, so I will do Indians (I guess that means native Americans) versus white people at some later date.

Speaking of gay people the proposition 8 thing in California sucked. Why should group A tell members of group B how to marry when the people in group A are generally not interested in marrying people in group B, anyway. Opposing gay marriage is just medieval, though I should point out that opposing gay people adopting kids is not necessarily so, given the various foo and bar reasons for accepting it or not. I know too little about the latter issue to have an opinion.

Speaking of gay issues, I find it so stupid that the state should subsidize people who want to "change" genders (and it happens here in Sweden - I guess having the world's second highest taxes means the government needs to find lots of stuff to do with all that money). I have had long discussions with gay (or trans or whatever the correct term is) rights people about this, but nobody has managed to convince me that a completely voluntary plastic surgery to alter your looks should be paid for by the rest of the people. Come on, there are millions of other people who do not particularly like the bodies they were born with, either, and most of them make do anyway. Use your own money.

Done

Moving: done.


After moving, I took a walk past the royal castle. Apparently, somebody had been fishing junk out of the water.


We also went mushroom hunting in the countryside. Nothing found, but it was a very nice walk.

The cat with many names, the current one being Bubblan ("the bubble"), loves the new apartment, and so do I. It is very bright, despite it being the first of October, and with no curtains up yet, the sunlight awakes me in the morning. It rocks. Sure, it takes a bit longer to get to work in the morning, but that is nothing compared to the joy of living closer to... perhaps not nature, but at least a few trees.

I am sort of surprised by the financial blaha in the world. Not so much by the behaviour of individuals as by their total inability to work together to further their own ends in the long run.

As an investment banker friend of mine said; "Everybody was playing chicken, and nobody steered out of the way before it was too late."

It is no wonder that things happened. Sooner or later, the idiot lending to people who could not pay had to end. Using an interest rate of one per cent when calculating would inevitably lead to disaster in a world where it can rise to ten times that or more, as it has done before. But the slick guys giving out credit cared only about their own short term winnings. Which is fine. That is what usually motivates people to work. What is not fine is that the management of the institutions did not have the appropriate checks in place, incentive programs if you will, to make their employees act in a "responsible" way. That is, create value for the shareholders. Apparently, the shareholders had not created the right kind of incentives for management either. And so it goes, mostly everybody loses and a small number of people have their pockets full of money, but not nearly as much as this mess has cost. Ergo, a big fucking net loss to society which makes a great case for those craving greater regulation of financial markets. Regulation for regulation's sake sucks, but I really wonder how to combat this sort of events in a completely "free" market.

Now to go pick up the engagement rings, though my lady is currently in a foreign land, in a foreign time.

Sten Tolgfors is a liar (and so is Ingvar Åkesson)

I have a hard time understanding the yes-side in the debate about the new Swedish "FRA law", which stipulates that all Internet traffic into and out of the country should be monitored by the FRA for - guess what - security reasons. The Minister for Defence, Sten Tolgfors, has actually stated in a major Swedish newspaper that this is certainly not "mass surveillance", since the FRA is only allowed to spy on information going out of the country, and according to specific search terms (which are not disclosed). Furthermore, there are unspecified "controls" which "monitor" their actions.

Well, guess what, Mr Tolgfors, you cannot really find the specific data allowed to be spied upon without looking at all the data, now can you? Somewhere within the deep, dank caves of government, all the Internet traffic will be caught and processed, and Swedish citizens will have absolutely no way of knowing how, where or when. The spooks will have the authority to map everybody's life without a warrant. One of the justifications is that "Hey, we could actually catch bin Ladin, Sweden might be al-Qaida's next taget!" Guess what? Mr bin Ladin encrypts his Internet traffic. Mr bin Ladin does not have a beef with Sweden. Mr bin Ladin is just a straw man for a government increasingly desperate to secure their insane law.

The government's statements are so bloody stupid that I am unsure whether Mr Tolgfors really believes in what he is saying, or if he has made devious calculations coming to the conclusion that a large enough part of population are such complete idiots that his cause can actually profit from his lies. I hope for the former but suspect the latter. Also, I sort of wonder what the ulterior motives are. More power for the government? More happiness from the U.S.? Transition into a fascist state? None of my guesses are particularly uplifting.

Oh, and from the horse's (the General Director of FRA, Ingvar Åkesson) mouth. My translation, mind you.

"FRA has never and will never 'monitor all citizens'. Only the traffic that is deemed to be interesting and that refers to foreign circumstances is selected, which is a fraction of all available traffic. Only a very small part of this information will in turn ever end up in FRA's system." (emphasis mine)

Apparently, Mr Åkesson is nothing short of a liar, because you cannot really be the General Director of the Swedish equivalent of the NSA and not know that to be able to select the interesting information, you have to somehow process all the information from which you want a subset of information. The "interesting traffic" does not automagically jump into the lap of the FRA, while the rest of the bytes flow past, unperturbed and unmonitored. Ergo, everybody's business is now showbusiness to the FRA.

The Horror

The horror. The most intrusive law ever devised has passed a vote in the Swedish parliament. All traffic on the Internet (except that which does not cross the Swedish borders, which is of course bullshit) will be monitored and collected by FRA (previously the National Defence Radio Establishment, though I guess they will change their name to the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit). This of course interferes with freedom of speech, press freedom and a host of other things people in a developed democracy would take for granted. Not in Sweden, not anymore. We will be an Airstrip Two, or Three, or Four, I am losing count, for Oceania. The law is nominally to stop "terror" and stuff like that, despite the fact that Sweden has basically never seen any terror at all. The money could be spent elsewhere, such as the armed forces, which have recently been downsized so much that Sweden would hardly be able to defend itself against any realistic threat.

This abomination of a law was approved by almost all members of the centre-right ruling coalition, save for Birgitta Olsson (who voted a courageous "dunno") and Camilla Lindberg, the only person courages enough to stand up for her beliefs. In all honesty, I would like to see the yes-voters tried for treason. However, I am not entirely sure whether it is illegal to subvert and destroy democracy.

Also, I found a cat on the street and we liked each other. I took it to the vet for a check-up and to see whether it had an owner. Since it was completely unmarked, it now lives with me. Pics later.

Between the Sheets

There are times when I am half-asleep and in a state between pondering the world's problems and dreaming about puking monkeys doing the macarena. Suddenly I am jolted awake, having an incredible idea in my head. I scribble it down on a paper, and then I go to sleep. Later on, I wake up and wonder what the hell I was thinking.

Last evening was one of those episodes. I devised the ultimate financial system, better than capitalism, communism and whatnot. It looked like this:


The day after, I woke up and realized that it was complete and utter shite, with assumptions so ridiculous that only an economist would not laugh at them. I especially wonder why the curve is s-shaped, so that rising above a certain level, the citizen suddenly costs society money again. Not to mention the problem of actually discerning the amount of production the individual citizen engages in.


I also bought a whole kilogram of sweet licorice which was just stupid. My tummy hurts. At least I found a cthulhu candy in the (bottom of the) bag.

The Things Men do

I have spent my recent time working, playing Team Fortress 2 and planning for yet another move. This time, however, I expect I will be letting someone else do the heavy lifting, because the November move was one of the most gruelling experiences of recent years.

In other news, happy new country, Kosovo! Not that I am a Balkan expert, but I think the right thing happened, more or less. Let us all hope that both Serbia and Kosovo join the European community, perhaps not as amiable friends, but at least with some sort of an armistice (such as PRC and RoC).

Oh, and if you are Swedish, please do not miss Maciej Zaremba's latest series of articles. I sometimes wish I was a demagogue of even half his skill, but if just a quarter of what he says is true, I am appalled.

A Severed Head at the Very Top of the Construct

Before being abruptly awakened by my constantly refurbishing neighbours, I had an interesting dream. Somebody had built a large sculpture, or rather device, of sorts. It was made entirely out of glass and chrome, resembling a sort of M C Escher figure. It had two parts, capitalism and socialism, which looked exactly alike. When these two parts were joined, a little mound of earth appeared at the very top of the construct, and a severed human head should be placed thereupon. This was apparently the epitome of human ideology.

Speaking of human ideology, I have been following the media reporting regarding the legal action against The Pirate Bay with some interest. It is both amusing and disheartening to see incompetent journalists (Svenska Dagbladet, in this case) describing file sharing on the 'net as "a pyramid structure of a Bandidos type" (er, what?!) where almost all unlicensed media files online are distributed by "the scene", a network of shady, evil profiteers. The worst thing about this complete bullcrap is not that the media lie or that they bend over and quote the copyright mafia verbatim. It is at times like this (and there have been quite a few) that I really start questioning whether what they write about other subjects, those I am not intimately familiar with, is true. When unfair and unbalanced becomes outright lies and bought journalists, society is in a dangerous situation.

Well, maybe it has always been this way, and the fact that I once thought that the calling of my life was to be a journalist, noble herald of the truth and defender of the people, pen in hand pointing towards darkened places, has made me at least try to pretend that it is not. Poppycock.