Footnotes in history

So, the big success in Bali is a footnote with a reference (including a PAGE NUMBER!) to a formerly agreed document, which states that a lowering of about 25-40% in CO2 emissions might eventually prevent the planet going boink (of course we know, it is, just like evolution or the bible, just a theory).

We are all safe now. Birds sing, peace on earth will begin soon, and wolve and deer live nicely together. And if not, we just buy a new deer.

It's improving!

»Há dez anos havia o dobro do dinheiro, mais professores e menos alunos, o mesmo resultado, o mesmo insucesso escolar, o mesmo abandono escolar«

De Rerum Natura cites the portuguese prime minister: »Ten years ago we had twice the money, more teachers and less students, but the same failures in school, the same amount of students dropping out«

This is an improvement. Crappy as ten years ago, but now much cheaper. This seems to be a very common way of thinking these days...

WTF?

Instead of ranting about our minister of interior going completely nuts (wanting targetet killings etc.) I'll blog about a city in Oregon who discovered that their traffic pilars look like penises:



I think they are right in banning these things. There is an awful lot of stuff which looks like penises and should be banned. Examples? Here they come:





Need to say more?

Moving slowly to the 21st century...

Today a lot of laws got passed by the Bundestag. Inbetween them is §202 E-StGB, which makes software illegal which has the purpose of attacking other computers. This includes nmap, ping and other usefull network tools, because they can be used to figure out weak points in your IT. It also includes all the tools any decent IT security person would use to check the systems he is responsible for.

Also passed got the second bucket of the Urheberrechtsnovelle, basically the copy-right law. From now on you can only access electronic publications from your university's library on special computers. The electronic subito is no longer allowed. To access research result's which were funded by tax money, published with tax money paid to the publisher, peer reviewed by tax money paid scientists (who don't get anything for this review), you now need to spend even more tax money to access. Elsevier and others will get rich, science will go boink.

Hurray to our well informed and competent politicians. [Note to those who can't understand German: it's politicians saying: "Internet, yeah, I think I have heard of it..."]

Politics

According to the political compass questionnaire I am belonging to the classical libertarian collectivism of anarcho-syndicalism. I am more left and liberitarian than Ghandi, Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama (Economic Left/Right: -5.50; Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.82).

The left

Don't leave the political left to the left! Everytime I read an article containing an intelligent point of view which takes apart critically the madness of our times, I think there is hope for a politic inspired by traditional left ideas. Then I get to the comments section and see all those would-be-revolutionaries fighting about the exegesis of Marx and distributing their conspiracy theories, generalising not-generalisable stuff, making up examples, misquoting, making up history etc, and then I loose all hope. Why can't there be any intelligent people on the left? All intelligent people I know who have been politically left gave up because of these trolls...

Maybe we should get together and create a new intelligent left (or something which is outside the classical left-right scheme, I think this is obsolete anyhow).