What’s Actually Fucked Up in the US

A week has passed since a mob of colourful buffoons invaded the US Capitol (what would be referred to as ‘the parliament building’ in a civilized country) and everyone down there and, occasionally, here, is still yakking about it. While I didn’t really plan on talking about it because it tends to reinforce the idea that the US should be above these things, I decided to, in the end, because I think people are surprised, and outraged, at the wrong things.

People, both in the US and in civilized countries, feign, or feel, surprise at the fact that a mob, incited by a losing presidential candidate, decided to invade the parliament. In reality, losing ex-presidents are disgruntled pretty much everywhere, and mobs try to invade parliaments regularly in all but the most advanced democracies. Just in 2020, it happened in Serbia in July and in Kyrgyzstan and Thailand in October. And mind that, due to The Virus, rioting wasn’t quite as popular in 2020, and that these three are only the ones I could think of quickly. What makes the US riots special is:

1. It worked. A mob armed only with rudimentary melee weapons successfully broke into a building defended by a special corp of 1700+ agents.
2. Several of said agents actually sympathized with the mob and did absolutely nothing to stop them.

People keep watching the Hollywood propaganda, and get the idea that American police is competent, well-trained, loyal and brave. It is none of these things: it is treacherous, incompetent, prejudiced, sadistic and cravenly. Faced with a like-minded but slightly-less-cravenly mob, it just melts.

However, the morbid incompetence of its supposed defenders is not, by any length, the most fucked-up thing about the American parliament (or, as those lunatics keep calling it, ‘the congress and senate’). The most fucked-up thing is this.
Let me TL;DR it for you: Democrats are actually scared that Republicans sympathizing with the mob will finish the job and actually murder them on the floor of the parliament. To prevent this, the Capitol Police (that’d be those 1700+ morons we were talking about above) started checking MPs (lunatics call them ‘representatives’) with metal detectors. Instead of denying their murderous intentions, said Republicans threw a tantrum about having their firearms removed. This happens nowhere else: parliament shootings have happened (a famous one in Armenia in 1999), but they were carried out by external agents. MPs punching each other and, occasionally, bashing each other with chairs are common throughout Europe; but nowhere outside of the US, not even at the heights of political violence in Jamaica, has a party faction been unashamedly planning mass shootings of its political opponents live on a public affairs network and bitched about being inconvenienced in this pursuit.

My message to those who still hold the US as a shining beacon of democracy for everyone is: you, Ladies and Gentlemen, are a bunch of idiots.

Dr. X, the Prophet

So, in my last post of 2020, I called, several times, the US a “banana republic”, much to the irritation of some of my readers. A little more than a week later, I was joined in my opinion by none other than George W. Bush. Oh well, odd fellow travellers, I suppose.

In Praise of 2020

Let’s clear the air: this is not to say 2020 was a good year. Aside from The Virus, and the fact I can’t buy trousers from England any more, a number of disturbing things have happened, upon which we might, or might not, linger in the future. This is, therefore, not an attempt at ending the year on an optimistic note; you should not better: this is the Communist Scientist. We don’t do optimistic.

This is rather the opposite: it’s a commentary on the things we have had this year and that you are going to miss in a very near future. And, sure, this could be a list of species of beetles or functional democracies; however, most of my readers aren’t likely to experience anything in either list, so I’ll skip that and move on to something we have more of today than ever, which is access to information.

It is true that, at least in Denmark, oversight into politics, i.e. what politicians are up to, is rapidly disappearing, with the abrogation of public access to public documents in 2013, the increasing recourse to closed parliamentary and city council sessions, and the threat of removing oversight agencies to remote parts of the country. It is also true that libraries have been closed most of 2020, during which time, I suspect, various municipality have fired massive amounts of staff, neglected to update their collections and planned on closing several locations. On top of that, for unexplained reasons and for an unspecified period of time, access to scientific magazines has been suspended.

However, you can ignore that, now, and go to Sci-Hub and download most scientific articles without cost and with minimal effort. Now, this is technically illegal in certain banana republics like, say, the US but it certainly isn’t unethical, as it breaks the perverse mechanism by which a few publishing houses have been milking universities for decades with nothing but minimal effort. But this is a subject for another day; what matters now is that every time that idiot girl who was with you in high school tells you on Facebook that there are “plenty of studies” proving that Aloe vera cures cancer, you can easily find out that not only there is none, but there is at least one proving it causes that (doi: 10.1177/0192623311422081, in case you want to download it from sci-hub). As for the risks you run by doing so in banana republics like, say, the US, I recommend you do as I do while writing this, namely use a VPN and an anonymized browser; I will not tell you which VPN because the constant bombardment of VPN ads annoys the heck out of me: just pick one that is not based in a banana republic like, say, the US. As for the browser, use FireFox: trying to get privacy with an Apple or Google product is like using the proverbial dingo as a baby sitter.

And, while you are tweaking your browser, you can also install an ad blocker, like uBlock Origin; this will give you access to an immense amount of educational content on youtube without being driven insane by advertising. If you can resist the lolcatz, you can learn anything on youtube. Quantum mechanics. Applied chemistry. Nanotechnology. How to engineer yeasts to murder people: it’s all there.

If you don’t feel like learning, but to expand your cultural horizons, and, say, watch opera (or The East Enders), we are still in a blessed situation where countless streaming sites, chief among them The Pirate Bay, YTS and TV underground have enough material to keep you entertained through a dozen pandemics. Of course, since protecting the income of the Hollywood propaganda machine, with violence if convenient, is important to the US and all associated banana republics, a VPN, and careful use of the ol’ noggin’ would be absolutely necessary if you, unlike the saintly author of these notes, were to engage in such criminal activities.

The point I am making is that none of this is going to last. A man, Aaron Swartz, has already lost his life trying to put scientific publications in the public domain, and his legacy was trampled after his death by the arseholes he founded reddit with. Watching youtube without ads is a continuous struggle to update to the latest software. A SWAT team was once sent to New Zealand to arrest a man charged with nothing more than torrenting entertainment; the man was subsequently arrested on trumped-up charges to be extradited to the US. And Julian Assange has been rotting in jail for years on trumped-up charges for running wikileaks awaiting to be extradited to the US.

You are not to be spared: enjoy it while it lasts.

Happy 1 May, Comrades

And while very few work, and are hardly paid, and very few are paid, and hardly work, here is another memory from the happy times where using one’s hands was not considered degrading, and trade wasn’t yet a religion.

The Mathematics of Lung Disease.

Every day, at about 7 o’clock, I wake up and, after the usual morning rituals, get out and take the bus to work.
Every day, at about 10 o’clock, my brother wakes up and, after the usual morning rituals, starts chain smoking.
My life choices (not driving and not having children so that the offspring of some bitch who only dates men with cars can have a semi-inhabitable planet), apparently, give me a roughly 1 in 500 chance of contracting Coronavirus, and therefore a 1 in 50000 chance of dying.
My brother’s life choices (voluntary unemployment because one can’t freely smoke in any office any longer) give him a roughly 1 in 5 chance of contracting lung cancer, and therefore a 1 in 6 chance of dying.

According to the experts, COVID-19, if left unchecked, will kill about 200 people in Denmark this year and then pretty much fade away. Lung cancer will kill about 3600 people, after which it will, well, kill another 3600 next year.

Forbidding smoking would remove about 3200 of those deaths; reducing city pollution to the levels of the country about 600.

Removing everyone from public transport would save the lives of…hard to tell. Probably a few dozens. Increased pollution would boost deaths from virtually every other lung condition, including lung cancer. The disruption to the environment and the economy would cripple the country for decades.

Therefore, to a rational government wishing to save lives and lungs, and to do so by making the lives of its citizens less comfortable, the choice would be obvious: recommend that people stop smoking and, if that doesn’t do anything (which it wouldn’t: remember my brother?), forbid tobacco.

However, lung cancer is old news, while Coronavirus is a hot topic; therefore, the Danish government has advised people to stop using public transport, and is talking of suspending it.

And this is a left-wing government, the kind that a hilarious political commentator calls “shite light”: imagine what the other guys would do.

Remember, comrades: inform yourself. Use numbers. Use science. Use your head. Your leaders will do nothing for you except for role-play in hazmat suits.

Happy 1 May, comrades

…and I would post the usual Soviet poster, but some more active comrade collected quite an enjoyable set here: http://russiatrek.org/blog/art/soviet-propaganda-of-may-1-international-workers-day/

Arseholes Baiting Idiots

I am coming out of my virtual retirement with a piece of Danish news that illustrates perfectly what is wrong with the left wing and its creepy fetish for Islamism; this is the piece of news: http://nyheder.tv2.dk/politik/2018-10-02-personer-fra-12-lande-skal-lettere-kunne-faa-arbejde-i-danmark
For those of my readers who are fortunate enough not to read Danish, this is a new law proposal that would let in workers from 12 select nations as long as an employer is willing to pay them 3688€ per month. It supplements an existing law that allows workers from just anywhere to come in if they can get a salary of 4672€ per month, which in turn is an extension of an older law (introduced to import select scientists and immediately abused for athletes and managers) which allowed employers, for a limited time, to hire foreign workers for an amount that, after inflation, was double that.
It is, in practice, a way of doing what pretty much everyone but the richest 1% of every country fears: it promotes immigration as long as it takes away jobs from the residents and reduces salaries; and, while I can imagine that, to most people in the world, 3688 Euro are a lot of money (they certainly were for me, before I moved to Denmark), one has to keep in mind that half of it you never see (taxes are detracted before salary is paid, in Denmark) and that you will need at least 500€ to eat and 500 to rent a place, in Denmark. Then you can start paying bills and, unless you bike, transport will cost you at least another 100€; all in all, 3688€ is the edge of living, around here.
So, this is a law to favour the rich and make the poor poorer: with the arseholes that sit in the Danish parliament today, it’s no surprise. But where is the baiting part? Well, the list of countries that would be allowed to inflate the Danish proletariat is as follows:
– USA
– Singapore
– China
– Australia
– Canada
– Japan
– Brazil
– Malaysia
– India
– Thailand
– Mexico
– Russia
This list, I have to admit, is genius. As soon as it came out, the idiotic Danish left took the bait and started griping that it contains no muslim countries. Of course, technically, Malaysia is a muslim country, but the idiotic Danish left can’t be arsed with this kind of detail. Also, China and India, combined, have a Muslim population of 200 million, but this is the same kind of detail. The genius is that, in fact, 58% of immigrant workers already come from these country (the vast majority from India and China, the rest is basically decoration), and this is without counting that much of the remaining 42% comes from EEA or Nordic countries, which have free movement into Denmark already. Effectively, this law would simply lower the minimum salary of immigrant workers: but the left is too busy bitching at the fact that Tunisia is not on the list to notice. After keeping the pantomime up for a few weeks, the government will magnanimously add a few Arab countries to it, the law will pass in a landslide, and Denmark will again see its unemployment raise, its salaries drop, and dozens fighting for each toiletless studio in Copenhagen. But arsehole politicians and idiot activists will be showing us their smug smiles: rejoyce.

Happy May 1

…a proper post will follow.

What Happens in Brussels

…is exactly nothing at all. Years of pervasive surveillance have failed to predict the location of (let alone prevent) a single terrorist attack, and so it shall always be. If something happens in Brussels, it will be after the hysteria blows off; in the meanwhile, islamists have attacked Bamako, resulting in this entertaining piece that tries to explain the facts, as well as where Mali might be, to the English public.

Update (7/12/2015): as Brussels no longer is in a state of emergency (also not to disturb the pre-christmas consumer orgy), absolutely nothing has happened there, albeit there was a shooting in California, which, as usual, hit the NSA, FBI, Homeland Security, and so forth as a ton of bricks. But, hey, if you download a film illegally, you’re in serious trouble, punk.

Paris past the Bullshit

So, ISIL (most likely) has killed 129 (so far) in Paris. Conservative newspapers are ranting about the end of Western Civilization, governments are thinking of putting more attention into reading your email, people are committing inane acts of solidarity, like putting the French flag on Facebook, and you are thinking of a friend of your second cousin who goes to Paris once a year and is therefore, most likely, lying in a pool of blood.

The only people who should be happy about this hysteria are ISIL; because, if you look at it objectively, 129 people are very few. ISIL kills twice as many every time it conquers a new village in Syria, which happens several times a week. Every time your government fires a nurse to hire some email-reading spook, it dooms far more people than that to a far more unpleasant death. Really, the only way one can achieve anything by killing 129 people is if the media blow them out of proportion and people start having their face in three colours on Facebook. And the only way you can fight terrorism is by thinking rationally. Rational thought will tell you that, yes, you have a high chance of being killed by an islamic fundamentalist in Paris; but this is not if you stroll downtown and happen to be involved in a shooting that happens once a year; it is if you stray too far from downtown and end up in the enormous, atrocious banlieu, the suburbs of Paris that the French government, with no other purpose than an idiotic celebration of its colonial past, has filled with unintegrated immigrants from North Africa, and where crime and fundamentalism walk side by side. Which, incidentally, means that, if France closes its borders, it is the rest of Europe that is safer.

Anyhow, if you stick to downtown, that is, if you have money enough, don’t worry: you’ll be able to enjoy that world of laicité, grands écoles, cognac and threesomes that ISIL hates so much (and please, don’t tell me you believe it is because France is actually doing something to hurt them in Syria) for a while still: santé.

Update (16/11/2015): as a Kurdish counter-offensive has taken back Sinjar, graves of 128 Yazidi killed by ISIL have been found; Facebook offers no Iraqi flag option, conservative newspapers fail to rant while France, and your cousin, don’t really give a shit.