Why /are/ there 'y's in the English name of Kyrgyzstan? Almost everywhere else the country is 'Kirgistan', 'Kirgisia', or something similarly y-free. Going through wikipedia, the only other non-cyrillic languages* to use y are Aceh, Cebuano (Philippines), Min, Turkmen, Vietnamese, and others whose names I don't recognize.

oddly decent article by John Naughton in the Guardian:

Consider, for instance, how the views of the US administration have changed in just a year. On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google. "Information has never been so free," declared Clinton. "Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable."

She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had "defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity." Given what we now know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.

The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That’s great. There were over 600,000 hunters.

Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth largest army in the world – more men under arms than Iran; more than France and Germany combined – deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay. [source]

Bitchy Jones, of course:

My point is this. Femdom is broken. It’s not even there. In a way you can’t blame mandoms for thinking there are no actual dominant women. Real femdom based on the desires of dominant women and submissive men coming together to find places of intersection is gone or never was. All there is a male-desire based economy so pervasive that even people doing stuff for themselves think the women needs to be dressed like and advert for herself as if she needs the business. And it isn’t really surprising that this popular idea of femdom fake out doesn’t have the visceral power of the popular idea of mandom. Because it isn’t real.

Sad news for French multiculturalism, as the only (!) politician who dared wear an islamic headscarf* has left the Nouvea Parti Anti-Capitaliste. Brent Whelan:

Moussaïd gave the party its most widespread--though least welcome--burst of publicity last February when she appeared on the list of local candidates in the regional election wearing the Islamic headscarf she favors. Squeezed between the strident criticisms of feminists and secularists, she held her ground--and insisted on her qualifications as a long-time social and party activist--with grace and poise that belied her 21 years. (See my previous post, "Veiled Threat," 2/15/10) After a storm of polemics, mostly hostile, both inside the party and in highly visible venues such as the Idées pages of Le Monde, Ilham and her local supporters had hoped the delicate issues of tolerance and diversity she raised could be fully aired in a party congress. But as that public debate receded in time--originally scheduled for November, then December, now February--she apparently lost confidence in the party's openness to her situation, and now her chapter is closed.

* We're not even talking about a hijab here, by the looks of it -- just a hair covering. i.e. something that wouldn't be the faintest bit controversial in any halfway-sane political climate.

Jet and Coal

Surprising to read in BldgBlog about jet engines being used to put out fires in coal mines.

The engineering field of putting out coal fires has intermittently intrigued me since I heard that they (supposedly) account for as much CO2 emission as all road vehicles in the US. Putting out these fires is an incredible engineering challenge, and one that even the most narrow-minded environmentalist couldn't object to.

So I can't help daydreaming about the kind of organization that could put out the fires. A band of idealistic engineers -- top graduates from Caltech and IIT, grizzled mechanics who've spent decades underground, geologists whose morals wouldn't let them stay in the oil industry. They're funded by a philanthropic tech billionnaire, or perhaps just from carbon offsetting. Together they cross the world, dragging exotic equipment and wrangling McGyver-like contraptions to deal with each mine. One day they land Thunderbird One in Centralia, point the engines down one of the shafts, and finally put out the fires that have been burning for decades.

Privacy, Secrecy, Pseudonyms: between Kurt and Pandora

Productivity and secrecy don't go well together.

I've been slow to accept this, because my private emblem of productivity is the neurotic workaholic. I find it most comfortable to imagine people driven by self-hatred, flinging themselves into creative obsessions to justify lives they would otherwise consider unacceptable, or as a diversion from the emotional wildfires and the social obligations which would otherwise pursue them.

This, of course, says more about me than about the outside world. Sad-but-productive has always been a figure of hope for me, alongside all those people who claim to ride out emotional troubles by burying themselves in work. It's appealing precisely because it's never worked for me -- because my ability to get anything done evaporates when I'm down. I'd love to clap my hands and believe that if I just learn to mope in the right way, I could be simultaneously sad and productive.

Because the alternative model of productivity -- the stronger one, the one built around self-expression rather than self-loathing -- is even harder to picture myself in connection with. But this is the more internally coherent kind. It comes from treating everything you encounter with open acceptance, welcoming all of life as material for creation. From not (as I do) ramming 90% of life into the closet, and trying to show people the remaining 10%.

Using your entire life in this way necessarily means abandoning the old pseudo-Romantic lie that each lifetime tells only one story. It requires saying "I am large. I contain multitudes"

Pseudonyms form one escape. Remember Weimar's cluster of insanely prolific intellectual streetfighters, people such as Kurt Tucholsky. Most of them were forced to write under multiple aliases. Partly this was for political reasons, partly to deal with the sheer volume of their output. Also, though, it was (was it?) to allow free rein to the different parts of their personalities, without running everything through one brand. Multiple personality as lifestyle choice, 70 years before Grant Morrison.

Friendship, therapy, confession

The therapist, the priest, the penpal, the stranger on a train. We always need some confessor who isn't among our friends. Why? Because in order to respect our friends, we must believe that they will disapprove of some things -- particularly, that they share something of our own set of morals. So when you've done something shameful, there's no hope in telling your friends. Either they'll lose respect for you, or (worse?) they'll accept your failure, and so you'll lose respect for them.

Just as Groucho wouldn't join a club that would have him as a member, so -- beyond a certain threshold of self-hatred -- you can't befriend somebody who would have you as a friend.

Here's the role for the expendable not-quite friend, whatever medical, spiritual or social guise s/he may take. Here also is another reason why religions and mores usually have some system of penance and forgiveness -- not just for patching up broken relationships, but because the /possibility/ of repair allows for openness.

Nina Power on chocolate and perky passivity

Nina Power on chocolate:

Chocolate represents that acceptable everyday extravagance that all-too-neatly encapsulates just the right kind of perky passivity that feminized capitalism just moves to reward with a bubble bath and some crumbly coca solids. It sticks in the mouth a bit. In a total abnegation of her own subjective capacity as well as the entire history of huamn achievement, Fay Weldon, for example, claims that:

"What makes women happy? Ask them and they'll reply, in roughly this order: sex, food, friends, family, shopping, chocolate"

I think there's a very real sense in which women are supposed to say 'chocolate' whenever somebody asks them what they want. It irresistibly symbolizes any or all of the following: ontological girlishness, a naughty viginity that gets its kicks only from a widely-available mucky cloying substitute, a kind of pecuniary decadence [One-Dimensional Woman, pp 36-7]

It's an interesting compare-and-contrast question: why have parts of the CIS been resolutely pro-American, while the Middle East has largely not? Presumably in part it's the effect of living under unpleasant Soviet rule, to which the USA was always the most visible opposition. But that effect can't last indefinitely; will there ever be a mass turn towards anti-Americanism in eastern Europe, the baltic states or the caucasus?

In Central and Eastern Europe, the countries of the former Warsaw Pact followed more or less that script. But in 2004-06, when Condoleezza Rice tried to extend the model to Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine, she got a rude shock. Citizens in those countries, given anything resembling a free vote, tended to support strongly anti-American candidates.

-- Helena Cobban

email over ssh/socks with evolution (to dodge wifi cafe firewall)

I've just been working in a cafe whose wifi blocks outgoing email. So I had to figure out how to send mail through an ssh tunnel. That is, hussle it through the firewall by sending it encrypted to a server elsewhere, and send the email outgoing from there.

For future reference, and in case it's useful to anybody else, here's how. This is assuming you are running ubuntu on your own machine, and have ssh access to a server somewhere else that's capable of sending mail.

We use ssh to set up a SOCKS proxy, over an ssh tunnel. This establishes a port on the local machine (here, port 1234). any traffic sent through that port will emerge from the server at the other end:

ssh -D 1234 username@server.net

Now, install tsocks. This lets you run another program, with all outgoing connections sent via SOCKS

sudo apt-get install tsocks

configure tsocks to use the tunnel you've set up

sudo vim /etc/tsocks.conf

look for the default server settings, at the bottom. Edit so that:

server = 127.0.0.1 
server_port = 1234

Now start your mail program under tsocks

tsocks evolution 

In order to make external mail sending work under this setup, I had to turn off TLS in evolution. I'm not sure if this is a problem inherent to the socks/ssh setup, or just with my particular situation.




more info: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=791323

Timothy Garton Ash

the professional members of the US foreign service have very little to be ashamed of... what we see here is diplomats doing their proper job: finding out what is happening in the places to which they are posted, working to advance their nation's interests and their government's policies.

In fact, my personal opinion of the state department has gone up several notches. .

We have an opportunity

K-punk on UK student protests:

the ruling class are counting on the street militancy fizzling out as suddenly as it flared up. We have an opportunity here, not only to bring down the government - which is eminently achievable, (keep reminding yourself: this government is very weak indeed) - but of winning a decisive hegemonic struggle whose effects can last for years. The analogy that keeps suggesting itself to me is 1978 - but it is the coaltion, not the left, which is in the position of the Callaghan government. This is an administration at the end of something, not the beginning, bereft of ideas and energy, crossing its fingers and hoping that, by some miracle, the old world can be brought back to life before anyone has really noticed that it has collapsed.

The name of Macedonia

I'd never realised the massive importance in Greece of the name of Macedonia. Wikileaks cable:

Regarding Macedonia, Errera said the GOM underestimates the seriousness of the name issue for Greece and that the U.S. should not make the same mistake. France will not pressure Greece on this issue. Furthermore, if Athens were to give in on the name issue, the Greek government could fall

Privacy and terrorism

The terrorism threat in Germany has been being hyped recently, through warnings from the Interior Minister and a false alarm over a bomb on a plane in Namibia.

German politicians have been impressively willing to call bullshit on this, in some cases openly suggesting that it's fearmongering as a political tactic.

In particular, the idea is already widespread that it's an attempt to build public support for increased surveillance and for weakening of privacy laws.

This wikileaks cable from February gives more fuel to that view. It shows that the US links German support for privacy with the lack of terrorist attacks in Germany: "the German public and political class largely
tends to view terrorism abstractly given that it has been
decades since any successful terrorist attack has occurred on
German soil"

Also, a little schadenfreude at the US saying that " We need to also
demonstrate that the U.S. has strong data privacy measures in
place so that robust data sharing comes with robust data
protections

thesaurus

take a large sample of text. Run it through NLT, looking for passages with multiple adjectives describing the same noun. or, to keep it simple, just passages like a *big*, *strong* man.

For each such coincidence, record a link between the two adjectives. big and strong go together

[my initial thought was to do this geometrically. imagine an n-dimensional space, where n is the number of adjectives in the english language. Place each word at 1 in its own dimension, and for every other dimension/word at the point given by some function of how often the two co-occur.

but that seems silly. It's more like a standard regression data-mining kind of thing.

Anyway, a project for a rainy day. And there's still need for some usable dictionary/thesaurus based on data-mining

Is it true that neoliberalism and new forms of religious fundamentalism appeared simultaneously? If so, why? (cf. here)

It's the economy of fear, stupid

Al-Qaeda (Yemen) claims it's sufficient for the West to disintegrate into paranoia -- killings aren't necessary:

"It is such a good bargain for us to spread fear amongst the enemy and keep him on his toes in exchange of a few months of work and a few thousand bucks," the statement said.

"We are laying out for our enemies our plan in advance because as we stated earlier our objective is not maximum kill but to cause [damage] in the aviation industry, an industry that is so vital for trade and transportation between the US and Europe".

AQAP said: "Two Nokia mobiles, $150 each, two HP printers, $300 each, plus shipping, transportation and other miscellaneous expenses add up to a total bill of $4,200. We will continue with similar operations and we do not mind at all in this stage if they are intercepted.

"To bring down America we need not strike big."

Granted, this is largely putting a good face on their inability to do more than mail parcels.

Lemuel @CT on non-electoral activism:

More pacifically, I would like to see a National Debtor’s Union that would organize collective mortgage strikes, destigmatize bankruptcy, block evictions from foreclosed houses, etc. There is no reason for the banksters to agree to any meaningful financial reform, or any more stimulus, until there is a plausible alternative that looks much worse for them.

dolboeb: Alcoholism is scarier than fascism. Survey asks Russians what issue most concerns them:

• 56%: inflation


• 53%: alcoholim and drug use


• 46%: unemployment


• 44%: standard of living


• 15%: economic crisis


• 13%: salary

Liz Phair on Keith Richards' autobiography

Pulled by the poppy and pushed by cocaine, Keith acquires a taste for working unholy hours in the studio that damn near kill his colleagues. He goes round the clock and considers it mutiny if anyone toiling with him leaves the deck. “I realized, I’m running on fuel and everybody else isn’t. They’re trying to keep up with me and I’m just burning. I can keep going because I’m on pure cocaine . . . I’m running on high octane, and if I feel I’m pushing it a little bit, need to relax it, have a little bump of smack.”

duranorak:

When someone writes the definitive essay on fandom - I mean, when someone sits down and explains the insanity of it, the way it is a black hole of time that means I sit here for long, long minutes trying not to grin so hard my face hurts and simultaneously cry like a child for no real reason, the way it can make total strangers loathe or adore each other in a way very few other things can, the fragmenting into groups, the shipping (WHY DO WE DO THIS. WHY. I was born doing it, and don't understand), the giddiness, the stars in my stupid hopeless eyes, the conventions, the cosplay, the meta, the joy and pain it's possible to experience through reading one sentence connected to one's current whatever-it-is - when someone writes that, will you let me know, so I can read it, and understand?

Ha! Is this really true? Harry Rowohlt is perhaps Germany's best-known translator from English, and also sports a beard that could compete with Alan Moore or Richard Stallman. Apparently he moonlights on the soap Lindenstrasse, playing a hobo? Brilliant :)

Hegemann

Not only is Helene Hegemann a bona fide genius, but she can put together a delightfully sharp response to her (many, 90% stupid) critics:

Im Januar wurde mein Roman Axolotl Roadkill veröffentlicht. In diesem Roman geht es nicht primär um Drogen oder Sex oder eine bestimmte Generation. Schon gar nicht geht es um Grenzen zwischen Generationen, Geschlechtern, Altersgruppen oder sozialen Schichten. Wenn es überhaupt um irgendeine Grenze geht, und das muss es ja in einer alles und jedem bestimmte Wertesysteme und Raster überstülpenden Gesellschaft, geht es um eine Grenze, die sich durch jeden Menschen zieht. Und um eine Gruppe von Leuten, die ihr Leben dieser Grenze, diesem Riss, dieser Widersprüchlichkeit verschreiben, anstatt das abzulaufen, was unter glatter »Normalität« verstanden wird und genauso wenig funktioniert wie »Asozialität« oder »Verwahrlosung«.

Aber, obwohl wir 2010 haben: Rebellion ist eben doch nicht bloß die leere Geste, die sich insgeheim eigentlich alle aus Bequemlichkeit erhoffen. Wir sind an einem Punkt angekommen, an dem sich nicht mehr gegen konkret abzusteckende Altersgruppen rebellieren lässt und an dem sich sowohl 13-Jährige als auch 60-Jährige als »linksalternative Spinner« und »rechtskonservative Wichser« beschuldigen oder sich streiten, weil einer von ihnen bloß Black Metal hört und der andere, wie nennt man das, Indiemusik und natürlich so Sachen von früher. Na ja.

Art as efficiency-porn

In recent weeks, I've been becoming increasingly dependent on art to get me through the day. My actual life is bland and featureless; working on things I believe in and care about intellectually, but boring myself silly doing it. The only way to con myself into concentrating is with a kick of words or music or pictures. Then 20 minutes of hand-waving ecstasy, settling down to a lingering vague sense of meaningfulness, that can easily be transferred to whatever dreary task I'm supposed to be working on. It feels somehow nastier than achieving the same effect with caffeine or self-discipline; like using manuscripts as firelighters or something.

Particularly useful is anything implying that the current moment is somehow important, that there's some reason to be emotionally focussed on now, rather than listlessly comparing it to tomorrow. So there's the line from _Possession_, for example:
"when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere."

And when that's too bleakly romantic for me, I look back to Alba De Cespedes' poems of love in Paris '68, in a last night of closeness before normality is restored:

Encore un soir, le dernier, nous serons entre nous: les fous d'amour et de révolte. Cette rive sera encore la nôtre; à nous seuls, prison, ghetto, léproserie.

One more night, the last, we'll be together: delerious with love and revolt. This bank will still be ours, ours alone: prison, ghetto, lepers' colony

Similarly, on Sunday I went to see a friend playing in a small band. What really shook me were the support band. And then not musically, but because the singer was obviously in the midst of some fairly serious depression**. Being able to spend an hour staring at somebody in that state was -- terrifying? powerful? horrifying? All the little traits that I can normally only see in isolation, blending together into self-reinforcing patterns.

* necessary guilt-disclaimer that, for all this talk about work, I'm not in fact doing a huge amount of it.

** or yes, maybe it was all an act. If so it was simultaneously an impressive feat of acting and not at all suitable for a gig.

A woman walks into a gym

My squeamishness about violence and competition doesn't stop me enjoying martial arts films. I skip quickly through the big fights, and concentrate on what I'm really there for: the training scenes. There's place in my heart for anything that fetishises hard work and long hours: the West Wing, the Devil Wears Prada and Press Gang all fit the bill. But martial arts is the only film genre to really place this on a pedestal (with other sports films coming in a distant second).

I've just discovered Million Dollar Baby, a boxing film with a particularly harsh light on the training process. Maggie Fitzgerald is a female boxer, who with difficulty persuades washed-up coach Frankie to train her.

Frankie's gym has the low-rent grubbiness typical of boxing films. So as Frankie starts to clock up the hours -- training late into the night after everybody else has left -- she's doing so in an impressively unglamorous environment. Just a punching bag, a dim pool of light, and Frankie.

We don't rely on gritted teeth or fixed stares to show how determined she is. Because determination -- here and in reality -- is present less in the moments of peak work, than in months and years of hard work and sacrifice. It's present in her diet of leftovers filched from the diner where she works, in the monastic environment of her home, in the dollars saved for boxing equipment. Above all it's in that late-night pool of light, the activities she returns to because she doesn't have -- doesn't believe she _can_ have -- anything else in her life.

To make a fighter, you gotta strip 'em down to bare wood. You can't just tell 'em "forget everything you know", you gotta make 'em forget it in their bones. Make 'em so tired they only listen to you, only hear your voice, only do what you say, and nothing else.

the Global War on Terror (the officially retired title soldiers on in popular usage, despite the Obama administration’s weird new appellation “Overseas Contingency Operation”)

Bolaño

"purportedly, Bolano used to write for 20, 40 hours at a time before passing out and then waking up and doing it all over again"

[source otherwise uninteresting]

and from a profile in the NYT -- nicely-crafted but again underwhelming:

His subjects are sex, poetry, death, solitude, violent crime and the desperate glimmers of transcendence that sometimes attend them. The prose is dark, intimate and sneakily touching

Nalanda

The Independent reports on plans for the re-establishment of Nalanda. It has all the markers of a 'flagship' project that will mainly serve to fluff politicians' egos and divert large amounts of money towards elites. Still, I can't bring myself to be entirely grudging about it.

Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel, Paypal co-founder and early Facebook investor, on politics and women:

Thiel announced: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." The public, he says, doesn't support unregulated, winner-take-all capitalism and so he doesn't support the public making decisions. This anti-democratic proclamation comes with some curious historical analysis. Thiel says that the Roaring 20s were the last period when it was possible for supporters of freedom like him to be optimistic about politics. "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron," he writes.

[from a delightfully vicious Slate profile]

It's scary to think that this guy's wealth and power are orders of magnitude above anything I could ever come close to attaining.

Another piece of regressive crisis-response, this time by the German government. They're reducing the eco-tax, and in place increasing cigarette taxes (TAZ. In other words, tax the poor and let polluting big business get away unaffected.

Tiger Beatdown:

One of the things that’s really important in this life, and in any form of political engagement, is to be aware that no-one is actually “one of ours.” Which is to say: The instinct you have to protect someone who seems to side with you, and to gloss over their crimes, is a bad one.

LRB on Blair's memoirs

He faced two serious and determined enemies during his time in Downing Street: al-Qaida and Gordon Brown. One, he concluded, represented a force so strong and rooted that it had to be uprooted and destroyed, since confrontation was inevitable; the only question was when and how. The other had to be contained, because stepping over the line would have been crazy and made war inevitable. But why on earth did he think that al-Qaida was an example of the first, and Gordon Brown of the second, rather than the other way round?

Cute Cthulhu is the scariest Cthulhu of all:

Part of this horrible obscenity lies in the ability of cute to undermine human reason and agency. The return of the Great Old Ones will reduce every human being unlucky enough to be alive to utter helplessness. But so too do we all become drooling sock-puppets of mammalian algorithms when confronted with furry exteriors, chirpy voices, disproportionately large eyes and heads, charming reductions of scale, and goofy facial expressions.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

What I don't understand about this, is why Chomsky chose such a lousy phrase to make his point. Only somebody who's never had a nightmare could deny the possibility of sleeping furiously, while you could easily describe the output of some environmental think-tank as 'colorless green ideas'. On another tack: what is Cthulhu, if not a 'green idea sleeping furiously'?

257 is 257 + 0

A python gotcha I never knew of before:

Python 2.6.5 (release26-maint, Aug 20 2010, 17:50:24)
[GCC 4.4.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 0 is 0 + 0
True
>>> 256 is 256 + 0
True
>>> 257 is 257 + 0
False
>>>

The Guardian don't really explain their reasoning on this, but apparently an "Unemployed lorry driver living with his wife and three children in inner London, paying £320 a week rent" stands to lose 7,136 from the cuts.

WTF:

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements.

Great article about the lifetracking movement -- finding the call to arms buried unconsciously deep within the movement.

Eric Boyd, for example, cobbled together a buzzing compass that attaches to his ankle and vibrates when he faces north. Tracking his orientation has translated into an intrinsic sense of direction, he says.

Alien Tort Statute

The Alien Tort Statute provided a roundabout method by which US corporations could be sued for their actions abroad, including by non-US citizens.

The US courts have just closed that loophole, in their usual style of walking backwards into significant legal changes. The Second Circuit court of appeals has ruled that the Alien Tort Statute applies only to individuals, not to corporations.