Grim

I'm having a "Ballad of Lucy Jordan" moment.

I'm not quite sure whether what I am wallowing in is self-pity or self-hatred. (It's 6am and I was woken by toothache after four hours' sleep, this may play a part in both my condition and my inability to judge it.)

Toothache: in addition to the two broken upper molars that I wrote about last year, I've had an aching lower-left molar for a few days. I'm afraid that if I go to the dentist to fix these, that he will tell me why my teeth seem to be going soft and falling apart. I actually worked up the courage to send an e-mail to his office over Christmas, asking for an appointment in January and an invoice in advance of work for 1000 Euros as a token of my earnest intentions. Had they replied with a date and time, I'd have kept the appointment, but they didn't and so I have aching teeth and (presumably) another unpaid invoice somewhere in these mountains of unopened mail (think of the landscape of Wall-E).

My life is closing down around me, I'm unable to see farther than about a quarter-hour ahead and utterly unable to take any constructive action. Getting dressed and going to work in the mornings drains my supply of self-motivation. My kitchen table is piled high with unopened letters and empty cereal boxes, because in order to open the letters and throw away the boxes I would first have to empty my paper-recycling-box, already full to overflowing, and I can't do that because don't know whether there is room in the bins outside to put the paper into. That is the state of my soul: I am unable to organize myself sufficiently to go outside and look in a garbage bin. Dear gods.

I was in Malta on a meditation retreat last week. What a laugh. It seems like centuries ago and what happened there sounds like the absurdly exaggerated tales that travellers tell to gullible strangers in bars. It amazes me that I can sit in the meditation group in SL or in the office, and nobody sees that I am broken inside. It seems ludicrous that other people look to me for support and advice (which somehow I am still able to give, how odd is that) — and grossly unfair, too: who supports me? Perhaps maintaining this false front is what's consuming all my psychic energy.

I spend a lot of time in Second Life, actually, until after 1am every night; being there lets me feel that I am still functioning normally. Who knows, perhaps it's even true. I don't know what I'd be doing with my time if I weren't there. Reading more than I do anyway, perhaps, or drinking beer in front of the TV that doesn't actually work. Meh.

I understand the appeal of going mad — really mad, rubber sheets and no-sharp-objects mad; of abandoning all responsibility for oneself and letting somebody else take all decisions and instigate all actions. Psych wards have to be awful places staffed by sadistic scum, simply to prevent themselves being overrun by would-be inmates. Take it as a sign of my state of mind that surrendering and letting myself be locked away seems like a good idea. I'm not going to do it, but it sure as hell appeals.

There. I dare you to post this.

Don't worry, I'm fine, really; at least for certain values of "fine." I am not about to jump in front of a train, nor to have myself committed, nor even to bash out my aching teeth with a hammer. I just needed to get this shit out of my head.

Broken again

Being a strangled cry of rage.

And of course it doesn't work today. Windows XP cannot connect to the Internets at all, and the VPN does not work. There seems to be a network gateway component missing today which prevents XP from reaching outside the Parallels software box. Not that I changed anything, of course. The gateway is simply gone, with no explanation of where it went and no visible means of creating another one.

Fortunately, because I have such a deep and well-justified fear and loathing of all things Microsoftian, I made a copy of the Parallels environment before configuring the VPN yesterday. The copy can of course connect to the Internets normally, because it still has this magical "gateway" thingy. Still, there is nothing in the configuration of the gateway object that tells me either why it is missing from the other environment nor how to create another one.

"Piece of fucking shit" is the expression that comes to mind.

Busy doing nothing

At least, nothing that I can or will write about presently, for a complex nexus of reasons arising from bad planning and worse decision-making on my part. So be it.

The topinambour recipe will appear in 2007 2008, I promise—but I have to find it first. The "Zeit" article that I linked to doesn't list the ingredients of the soup (though it does list the other four dishes' ingredients) so I will have to track down the pages that we worked from.

Walking, reading, eating relatively little but more healthily, drinking no alcohol at all.

Except that I ate and drank far too much on Friday at a birthday party, as one does; home at 3:30 and was awake until 5, then slept only five hours. Saturday was correspondingly rocky.

This week's much-delayed Friday Favourite will also be the last, at least for the foreseeable future: a newly-passed law requires German ISP's (and telephone and cellphone companies) to track and record every connection made through their services, and to make this available for six months in searchable form to any government agency that happens to ask. The matter will fail miserably, of course: the data to be collected amounts to several terabytes per day*, there is no provision in the law for payment for the hardware necessary to store all this nor for the electricity to run the hardware nor for a charge for accessing it; there is no definition of what "searchable" actually means; and not even Google has any idea how to dice and slice that amount of disparate data arriving that quickly.

That being said, the law is the law and therefore the system must be implemented at great cost (economic and political) so that it can be seen to fail miserably before the law can be revoked. Now, tracking down persons who infringe on commercial rights is not the purpose of the law, which like many other bad laws around the world has been enacted under the guise of "fighting terrorism;" but the observable fact is that government exists to better enable corporations to pick the pockets of its citizens, so it will not be long at all until this data is being used to sue children who exchange ringtones on the playground or download songs from the Internet. Until the bill is revoked, posting these Favourites is just too dangerous: in Germany, the penalty is not restricted to fines (absurdly high though those can be) but may encompass actual time in jail.

Yes, you're right: it is an egregious pile of crap offensive to any thinking person. But it is also the law, for now, and for the time being we must live with it.

Oh yes, with all the ranting I nearly forgot: here's the song, from this album. Enjoy loudly; singing along is encouraged.

Moving rapidly along as I do think we should, here's a thought to prime the pumps of your New Year's listmakings. To set the scene: George, Harris and the narrator J are preparing to spend a week in a small boat on the River Thames, rowing up to Oxford, and are deciding what to pack.

The first list we made out had to be discarded. It was clear that the upper reaches of the Thames would not allow of the navigation of a boat sufficiently large to take the things we had set down as indispensable; so we tore the list up, and looked at one another.

George said:

"You know we are on a wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can't do without."

George comes out really quite sensible at times. You'd be surprised. I call that downright wisdom, not merely as regards the present case, but with reference to our trip up the river of life, generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is ever in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber.

How they pile the poor little craft mast-high with fine clothes and big houses; with useless servants, and a host of swell friends that do not care twopence for them, and that they do not care three ha'pence for; with expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation, and with — oh, heaviest, maddest lumber of all! — the dread of what will my neighbour think, with luxuries that only cloy, with pleasures that bore, with empty show that, like the criminal's iron crown of yore, makes to bleed and swoon the aching head that wears it!

It is lumber, man — all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment's freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment's rest for dreamy laziness — no time to watch the windy shadows skimming lightly o'er the shallows, or the glittering sunbeams flitting in and out among the ripples, or the great trees by the margin looking down at their own image, or the woods all green and golden, or the lilies white and yellow, or the sombre-waving rushes, or the sedges, or the orchis, or the blue forget-me-nots.

Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need — a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

Jerome K. Jerome, "Three men in a boat (to say nothing of the dog)"

I can think of nothing finer than that last paragraph to wish you for the coming year, dear readers.


* Assume for the sake of argument that "several" actually means "1.0003" A terabyte per day is 12 megabytes every second. That brand-new and expensive 320 gigabyte hard-disk you just bought? You'd need twenty-three of those per week.

On turning garbage into wolves

Two quotes. First, from today's FAZ.net (my translation):

Four Neonazis in Mittweida [former East Germany, near Chemnitz] attacked a six-year-old child and cut a swastik in the skin of a 17-yr-old girl who came to her defence. The attacks happened on November 3rd.

The girl only reported the attack nine days later. Police consider her story believable, because medical tests confirmed that the 5cm swastika was not cut by herself. They were also able to find the original victim, who confirmed the girl's report.

According to the girl, four skinheads were pushing a six-yr-old child of a "Spätaussiedler" family in the parking-lot of a supermarket. The child was already crying loudly as the girl shouted that the men should leave it alone. Which they did: three of them knocked the girl to the ground and held her while the fourth cut a swastika in her hip with a sharp object. [...]

The mayor hopes that after publication of the attacks, witnesses will come forward. The girl reported that local residents had been watching the events from their balconies. So far no witnesses have spoken out.

The second is from George Steiner's brilliant and harrowing novel "The portage to San Cristóbal of A.H.":

It was [Hitler] who made real the old dream of murder... With his scourge of speech and divining rod. With his nose for the bestial and the boredom in men's bones. His words made the venom spill... He took garbage and made it into wolves. Where his words fell lives petty or broken grew tall as hate.

One of these days, when I'm in a particularly bad mood, I shall transcribe and post the chapter known as "Lieber's Lament," from which this quote is taken.

Twenty-five down, five to go.

Politics, Sunday edition

Woken at six by a pounding headache, right on the cusp of being a migraine. I ignored it for an hour, then slept again until 10:30 by which time it was reduced to a continuous dull roar in the background.

Reading about Bush's keen desire to start yet another war—because the first is going so very well, you see—in Iran this time. One must assume that he and Cheney are clinically insane and/or suicidal. Presumably they think that we will all the good people will be ascending to Heaven any day now, so what they do in the meantime doesn't matter a fart. International law? nothing against God's Perfect Will as revealed exclusively to us. National laws? how dare you suggest that a politician be bound by such trivia. The populace? fuck 'em; the right-thinking (i.e. not thinking) ones will forgive all when they meet us in Heaven, and who cares what the others think.

And in case you're not yet steaming mad, read Naomi Klein on the privatisation of formerly public services. Funny how some names just keep on recurring: the same companies getting fat at your expense on no-competition, no-oversight, no-accountability government contracts in Iraq are the ones profiting from government cutbacks in the public sector. What a strange coincidence!

Bah.

Impeach the bastards now, while you still have the right to do so.

And because it's not all corruption and dishonour this week's PostSecret collection includes this photo, captioned "We are poor. And our kids don't know it." A reader commented

Once I was driving up Pacific Coast Highway on my way to work on a movie set at a mansion on the beach in Malibu. It was a nice day and there was a clunker of a car driving next to me with all the windows open. It was a 'poor' Mexican family. They were all smiling and singing. The father looked kind. The kids looked happy. I saw them and hoped that someday I would have a rich life like that.

Indeed.

Four down, twenty-six to go.

Meat is murder

While I waited to get my annual flu vaccination this morning, I picked up a copy of "Stern" and read an article on the follow-up to a scandal in the meat trade last year. (Hundreds of people became ill after eating condemned meat which had been intentionally mixed into produced foods.) It's happened again; it has apparently never stopped happening.

I was shocked to learn that meat can be offered for sale more than two years after the animal was slaughtered! It's not fit for human consumption, of course, and may only be used for pet food, but still: there are cold-stores around the world containing thousands of tonnes of meat that is nearly as old as your pet. All perfectly legal.

We the public are protected against these slowly rotting corpses by a little paper tag glued onto the outside of the packaging. With the tag, it's worth twenty cents a kilo. Should an unscrupulous dealer rip off that tag, it's worth three Euros a kilo.

Are you surprised to hear that there are unscrupulous dealers who rip off the tags? They mix this awful stuff in with fresh* meat, grind it all up to hamburgers and doner-kebab skewers, and sell it to us. Mm-mm good.

When the scandal broke last year, the greater public was enraged at those damned unscrupulous foreigners running the street-corner doner-kebab stands which sold the stuff, poisoning us good innocent trusting Germans; since the guilty firms were not named, nobody knew any differently. This time around, the Stern has named names and published photos. It's a very interesting list, not that the greater public will care.

The first non-purebred-German name on the list is that of the whistleblower: a Serbian truck-driver who spotted a dealer ripping off a tag and notified the police. The next non-purebred-German names are those of the victims: the end-consumers who bought the awful stuff.


* though one has to ask oneself what this word actually means.

Who needs horror movies?

From Hendrik Herzberger's article The Darksider in the "New Yorker" of 9/16 July:

[M]any of the details and incidents that Gellman and Becker document [in a four-part series in June in the "Washington Post"] are as new as they are appalling. More important, the pattern that emerges from the accumulated weight of the reporting is, as the lawyers say, dispositive... for the past six years, Dick Cheney, the occupant of what John Adams described as "the most insignificant office that the invention of man contrived," has been the most influential public official in the country, not necessarily excluding President Bush, and his influence has been entirely malign. He is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy and ignorant President he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law (a fairly standard attitude for conservatives of his stripe) but also of the very idea that the Constitution and laws of the United States, including laws signed by his nominal superior, can be construed to limit the power of the executive to take any action that can plausibly be classified as part of an endless, endlessly expandable "war on terror."

More than anyone else, including his mentor and departed co-conspirator, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country’s moral and political standing: the casual trashing of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions; the claim of authority to seize suspects, including American citizens, and imprison them indefinitely and incommunicado, with no right to due process of law; the outright encouragement of "cruel," "inhuman," and "degrading" treatment of prisoners; the use of undoubted torture, including waterboarding (Cheney: "a no-brainer for me"), which for a century the United States had prosecuted as a war crime; and, of course, the bloody, nightmarish Iraq war itself, launched under false pretenses, conducted with stupefying incompetence, and escalated long after public support for it had evaporated, at the cost of scores of thousands of lives, nearly half a trillion dollars, and the crippling of America’s armed forces, which no longer overawe and will take years to rebuild.

The stakes are lower in domestic affairs—if only because fewer lives are directly threatened—but here, too, Cheney’s influence has been invariably baleful. With an avalanche of examples, Gellman and Becker show how Cheney successfully pushed tax cuts for the very rich that went beyond what even the President, wanly clinging to the shards of "compassionate conservatism," and his economic advisers wanted. They show how Cheney’s stealthy domination of regulatory and environmental policy, driven by “unwavering ideological positions” and always exerted “for the benefit of business,” has resulted in the deterioration of air and water quality, the degradation and commercial exploitation of national parks and forests, the collapse of wild-salmon fisheries, and the curt abandonment of Bush’s 2000 campaign pledge to do something about greenhouse gases. [...]

Cheney, Gellman and Becker report, drew up and vetted a list of five appellate judges from which Bush drew his Supreme Court appointments. [...] The result is a Court majority that, last Thursday, ruled that conscious racial integration is the moral equivalent of conscious racial segregation. [...]

[L]ast week, Cheney provoked widespread hilarity by pleading executive privilege (in order to deny one set of documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee) while simultaneously maintaining that his office is not part of the executive branch (in order to deny another set to the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives). On Cheney’s version of the government organization chart, it seems, the location of the Office of the Vice-President is undisclosed. So are the powers that, in a kind of rolling, slow-motion coup d'état, he has gathered unto himself. The laughter will fade quickly; the current Administration, regrettably, will not. However more politically moribund it may become, its writ still has a year and a half to go. A few weeks ago, on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, the Vice-President issued threats of war with Iran. A "senior American diplomat" told the Times that Cheney’s speech had not been circulated broadly in the government before it was delivered, adding, "He kind of runs by his own rules." But, too often, his rules rule. The awful climax of "Cheney/Bush" may be yet to come.

Impeach the bastards now, while you still have the right to do so.

1984 again

Attention all Americans: George Bush has given the Secretary of the Treasury the power to freeze all your assets forever, at his (SoT) sole discretion and without the bother of presenting evidence or even probable cause. There is no provision for appeal, and anyone who assists you in any material way, e.g. by giving you food or paying your rent or representing you in a court of law, risks having their assets frozen too.

The Executive Order is framed in terms of denying material support to the insurgency in Iraq, but since the Order does not require the presentation of evidence and is not subject to judicial review or appeal, it can in fact be applied at the SoT's whim to any person, company or organization in the United States; § 1702(a)(1)(B) implies that this may apply to the American assets of foreign people or organizations too.

The original declaration is here; translated into English and commented here, further comments here and here; tip of the hat to Rana.

Write about this on your blog; then write to your Congressman and your Senators, asking them why they haven't yet protested against this egregious abuse of power; then write to your local newspaper and TV station, asking them why they haven't reported it.

Impeach the bastards now, while you still have the right to do so.

Very B.S.D.T.

And the punchline is: I can't even format the hard disk and start again. An error message appears, saying (and I quote at full length) Windows konnte die Formatierung nicht abschliessen. You will note the absence of explanations or reasons or suggestions or even ways to go about finding out what happened.

I am going to throw this fucking thing out of the window.

What enrages me most, as a pampered Mac user, is the utter opacity of Windows. "The operation failed." Whaddaya mean, you want to know why? You are not entitled to know that, you pathetic little (scornful sneer) user. If you were entitled to know why the operation failed, it would not have failed. Just because it's your computer does not mean that you have any say in what it does or doesn't or should or shouldn't do. So there.

And people voluntarily buy this stuff? Does not compute.

B.S.D.T.

The world needs a new emoticon: the exact opposite of the heart in "I heart NY". I propose the big stinking dog turd (imagine it as drawn by Keith Haring).

I big stinking dog turd Windows XP.

I've written before about the problems of getting things to work properly after reinstalling Windows XP. Well, tonight I cannot get the compiled application to run. It throws out an error number which doesn't exist (i.e. is not in the system documentation) and then quits. I can't even open it with the debugger to watch how and where it crashes. I would format the hard disk and start again, were I not afraid that it would take two weeks to get the system running again. Damn damn damn damn damn and damn.

Very big, and very stinky.

In happier news I'm listening to a recently-purchased CD, Em Minas ao Vivo which I'd recommend to all fans of Antonio Carlos Jobim. This is a live album recorded in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 1981. It's very simple, just Tom and his piano, miked up very close and personal as though he were singing just to you. There are no surprises here, you know every tune by heart; but damn he's good.

The web page linked above is worth reading (for Jobim fans) even if you aren't going to buy the CD.

Not a paid review

A heart-warming message arrived this morning on a bulletin board that I read:

Today, Bristol-Myers Squibb, the pharmaceutical monolith that charges nearly $1,000 for a 30 day supply of one of its HIV/AIDS medications, is donating $1 to the National AIDS Fund for each person who simply visits their website and "virtually lights a candle."

My, you think, how noble and generous they are  — as you are intended to think. Well, think again my dears. As of midday CET the message is very different. The website now reads:

Thank you for lighting a candle to support the fight against HIV/AIDS... As a result, we are proud to honour our commitment to donate $100,000 to the National AIDS Fund to continue their vital work with those most impacted by this disease.

Pah. They are donating the annual turnover from eight patients. Well whoop-de-fucking-do.

As of 14:25 CET the count stands at 1,448,381 candles. They are donating 6.9 cents per candle-lighter, not a dollar.

BM-S paid its shareholders 2.18 billion dollars in dividends in 2005. (It's on page 120 of their annual report.) That is 1509 dollars per candle-lighter.

BM-S turned a nett profit of 3 billion dollars last year (page 116). The donation is equal to the profit they earn every 17.5 minutes.

BM-S spent 509 million dollars on advertising in 2005 (page 83). The donation is equal to the amount they spend on advertising every two hours.

I am glad that they are donating money to the National AIDS Fund, and even more so that they are supporting clinics and healthcare centres in Africa and Asia (pages 6-7). I am disappointed that the amount is so trivially small, and offended that they clearly expect me to be awed by their sensitivity and wholesomeness. Pah.