Author: Carsten Agger

Jeff Jones er død (1944-2011)

Jeff Jones: Idyl
Jeff Jones: Idyl

Den banebrydende tegneserieskaber og kunstner Jeffrey Catherine Jones er død. Hun blev 67 år. Som Mark Frauenfelder skriver på Boing Boing:

I was sad to learn that one of my favorite illustrators, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, died today. I first came across her work in the 1970s when she was doing a regular one page comic strip for National Lampoon called Idyl. It was light hearted and whimsical and nothing like the rest of the magazine.

Idyl var en af mine egne yndlingstegneserier, indtil jeg lånte albummet ud og aldrig fik det tilbage. Men sådan kan det jo gå. Hvil i fred, Jeff Jones.

Jeff Jones, death

Søren Pind vil sortere indvandrere efter race

Det hedder det sig ganske vist ikke officielt, men intentionen er svær at tage fejl af. Som DR skriver, vil Søren Pind nu

gennem positiv særbehandling gøre det lettere for borgere fra bestemte lande at blive familiesammenført til Danmark.

– Det er et kolossalt problem, at udlændingelovgivningen er så fyldt med lighedsmageri, at vi skader folk, som gerne vil og kan Danmark, i helt unødig grad. Reglerne har været pakket ind i juristeri og misforstået lighedsmageri, siger Søren Pind.

Han vil i første omgang fritage borgere fra lande som USA, Canada, Australien, New Zealand og Japan for at tage den såkaldte indvandringsprøve, man skal have for at blive familiesammenført.

Med andre ord: Indvandrere fra “hvide” lande kommer forrest i køen, med Japan som den eneste undtagelse.

En bekendt, en ingeniør, der i sit arbejde hvert år tjener millioner hjem til sit danske firma og til gengæld lægger flere hundrede tusinde kroner i skat, har denne kommentar til Pinds nye regler:

I’m sick and tired of racism here and everywhere else. Apparently I keep being hounded just because my skin is not white!

Probably this is the straw that breaks camel’s back. Seriously I need to leave this country ASAP. Screw Denmark. I want to see this country closed and shut down and crumble to pieces. Sorry Danes, but my rage is uncontrollable after I read this article.

Jeg tror ærligt talt heller ikke, at Pinds nye “white Western only”-politik vil give folk fra Australien, USA og Canada spor mere lyst til at tage til et land, hvor hele det politiske liv er taget som gidsel af en højrepopulistisk bevægelse og deres aflægger i Folketinget. Snarere tværtimod.

Det europæiske højre marcherer – Danmark går først

Will Hutton i The Observer:

Every month, there is another milestone passed in the ever onward march of Europe‘s populist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, nativist right. “If they want to turn Stockholm, Gothenburg or Malmo into a Scandinavian Beirut with clan wars, honour killings and gang rapes, let them do it. We can always put a barrier on the Øresund bridge,” said Pia Kjaersgaard, leader of Denmark’s People’s party recently. On Wednesday, she got her way.Denmark is unilaterally to introduce border and customs controls on its borders with Germany and Sweden – an event Kjaersgaard and her party celebrated with pink champagne and Danish bacon crisps. Her detestation of foreigners, and Muslim immigrants in particular, are the central force in Danish politics. Border controls were the price of her support for the minority government’s controversial package of welfare and pension cuts.

Customs and identification checks on the 60,000 cars daily crossing the bridge between Denmark and Sweden may appear to be an irritant just to the travellers concerned, but in fact they represent a dagger pointed at the heart of one of the EU’s great accomplishments. The free movement of people in Europe is underwritten by the Schengen Agreement – a “beautiful achievement”, according to EU commissioner for home affairs Cecilia Malmström: she is right.

But Denmark chose to put itself outside EU law and mortally wound the agreement. EU interior ministers – reacting to Europe’s new paranoias – were to agree just hours later to give countries the right to do just what Denmark has done. But wider agreement is uncertain and in any case might take months. So the Danes jumped the gun. The EU be damned. Kjaersgaard would like to leave it anyway.

Samtidig er tyske turister begyndt at aflyse deres ferier i Danmark i protest mod grænsekontrollen og fremmedhadet i dansk udlændingepolitik. Leder af FDP i Schleswig-Holstein, Wolfgang Kubicki bifalder denne udvikling, skriver Reuters:

Der schleswig-holsteinische FDP-Fraktionschef Wolfgang Kubicki hat deutsche Touristen indirekt aufgefordert, ihren Dänemark-Urlaub wegen der Rückkehr des Landes zu Grenzkontrollen abzusagen.Es sei eine gute Nachricht, dass laut Medienberichten viele deutsche Urlauber ihren Ferienaufenthalt in Dänemark wegen der Kontrollen stornieren wollten, sagte Kubicki am Samstag beim FDP-Parteitag in Rostock. Dies sei eine “sehr intelligente Antwort von Menschen” auf eine politisch unsinnige Entscheidung, fügte das Bundesvorstandsmitglied der FDP hinzu.

Die dänische Minderheitsregierung führt auf Druck der rechtspopulistischen Volkspartei demnächst Grenzkontrollen ein.

Bemærk fremhævelsen. Reuters konstaterer som et simpelt, ukontroversielt faktum, at Dansk Folkeparti er et højrepopulistisk ekstremistparti. Gad vide, hvorfor den danske presse ikke tør det, når nu det er sandt?

Michael Moores tanker om drabet på Osama bin Laden

Michael Moore gør opmærksom på, at denne praksis med at dræbe landets fjender i deres nattøj gør USA til et dårligere land:

For nine years I wrote and I said that Osama bin Laden was not hiding in a cave. I’m not a cave expert, I was just using my common sense. He was a multimillionaire crime boss (using religion as his cover), and those guys just don’t live in caves. He had people killed under the guise of religion, and not many in the media bothered to explain that every time Osama referenced Islam, he wasn’t really quoting Islam. Just because Osama said he was a “Muslim” didn’t make it so. Yet he was called a Muslim by everyone. If a crazy person started running around mass-killing people, and he did so while wearing a Wal-Mart blazer and praising Wal-Mart, we wouldn’t automatically call him a Wal-Mart leader or say that Wal-Mart was the philosophy behind his killings, would we?

Yet, we began to fear Muslims and round them up. We profiled people from Muslim nations at airports. We didn’t profile multi-millionaires (in fact, they now have their own fast-track line to easily get through security, an oddity considering every murderer on 9/11 flew in first class). We didn’t run headlines that said “Multi-Millionaire Behind the Mass Murder of 3,000” (although every word in that headline is true). You can say his wealth had nothing to do with 9/11, but the truth is, there is no way he could have kept Al Qaeda in business without having the millions he had.

Some believe that this was a “war” we were in with al Qaeda – and you don’t do trials during war. It’s thinking like this that makes me fear that, while bin Laden may be dead, he may have “won” the bigger battle. Let’s be clear: There is no “war with al Qaeda.” Wars are between nations. Al Qaeda was an organization of fanatics who committed crimes. That we elevated them to nation status – they loved it! It was great for their recruiting drive.

We did exactly what bin Laden said he wanted us to do: Give up our freedoms (like the freedom to be assumed innocent until proven guilty), engage our military in Muslim countries so that we will be hated by Muslims, and wipe ourselves out financially in doing so. Done, done and done, Osama. You had our number. You somehow knew we would eagerly give up our constitutional rights and become more like the authoritarian state you dreamed of. You knew we would exhaust our military and willingly go into more debt in eight years than we had accumulated in the previous 200 years combined.

If we really want to send bin Laden not just to his death, but also to his defeat, may I suggest that we reverse all of that right now. End the wars, bring the troops home, make the rich pay for this mess, and restore our privacy and due process rights that used to distinguish us from any other country. Right now, our democracy looks like Singapore and our economy has gone desperately Greek.

Hideki Tojo killed my uncle and millions of Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos and a hundred thousand other Americans. He was the head of Japan, the Emperor’s henchman, the man who was the architect of Pearl Harbor. When the American soldiers went to arrest him, he tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the chest. The soldiers immediately worked on stopping his bleeding and rushed him to an army hospital where he was saved by our army doctors. He then had his day in court. It was a powerful exercise for the world to see. And on December 23, 1948, after he was found guilty, we hanged him. A killer of millions was forced to stand trial. A killer of 4,000 (counting the African embassies and USS Cole bombings) got double-tapped in his pajamas. Assuming it was possible to take him alive, I think his victims, the future, and the restoration of the American Way deserved better. That’s all I’m saying.

Link: Some Final Thoughts on the Death of Osama bin Laden (via Boing Boing).

Bahrain – hvorfor den larmende tavshed?

Mens vi hører om nedkæmpelsen af oprøret i Syrien og borgerkrigen i Libyen, er der noget nær fuldstændig tavshed om Bahrain. Er det, fordi Bahrain er en af USAs vigtigste allierede i Golfen, eller fordi det er vores allierede og gode venner i Saudi-Arabien, der deltager i undertrykkelsen? Al Jazeera English lader tre af områdets eksperter diskutere spørgsmålet.

Mens vi andre skal spare, kaster regeringen og R penge i grams til olieselskaberne

Det skriver Information – mens det diskuteres, hvor meget vi alle skal spare for at “redde velfærdsstaten”, har regeringen siden 2003 foræret Mærsk og andre olieselskaber 76 milliarder kroner:

76 milliarder kroner. Mindst. Så meget mere end forventet har Mærsk Oil og de øvrige olieselskaber i Dansk Undergrunds Consortium (DUC) tjent efter skat på Nordsøolien siden 2003. Lige så meget er det danske samfund gået glip af i skatteindtægter. Det viser beregninger foretaget af Enhedslisten dagen efter, at Mærsk fremlagde et kvartalsregnskab med massivt milliardoverskud, herunder 2,8 mia. i profit på olie- og gasaktiviteter.Finansordfører Frank Aaen (EL) peger på det urimelige i, at regeringen og dens aktuelle forhandlingspartnere leder efter milliardbesparelser på velfærdsområdet, alt mens olieselskaberne får lov at beholde langt flere milliarder end forudset tilbage i 2003, da regeringen, DF og Radikale Venstre lavede den gældende Nordsø-aftale med Mærsk.

At øge statens andel af Nordsø-milliarderne via ændret beskatning vanskeliggøres imidlertid af en såkaldt kompensationsbestemmelse i 2003-aftalen, der indebærer, at for hver en ekstra krone, staten måtte pålægge Mærsk og de øvrige selskaber i skatter el.lign., skal selskaberne have en krone retur.

»En aftale af den type kendes ikke fra noget andet land omkring Nordsøen. Man skal til lande som Kasakhstan, Angola eller andre urolige steder i verden for at finde noget tilsvarende,« mener Aaen. I de andre lande, hvor Mærsk Oil producerer Qatar, Algeriet og Storbritannien kan staten hæve oliebeskatningen i takt med olieprisen.

Og det ville da også være naturligt at gøre her. Men det ville jo ikke gavne de borgerlige partiers lobby-venner og rundhåndede donorer i erhverslivet, så det skal vi nok ikke vente noget af. I mellemtiden kan regeringen og de radikale passende skamme sig over at spare på skoler, efterløn og dagpenge, mens pengene deles ud med rund hånd til vennerne i erhvervslivet. Dansk politik bliver mere og mere korrupt for hver dag, der går.

Fri software – inspirerende scenarier

Den sydafrikanske regering udgav i 2002 en rapport om Free/Libre and Open Source Software in South Africa (opdateret flere gange, bl.. i 2004), og den indeholder en række scenarier for den umiddelbare gavn af fri og gratis tilgængelig software, som i sig selv er grund nok til at læse den:

SIPHO’S CHOICE

Sipho has good reason to be pleased with himself; he has just submitted a groundbreaking PhD thesis at a leading South African university. Using advanced concepts in mathematics and physics, his thesis, “QVM: the Quantum Virtual Machine”, proposes an ingenious algorithm to speed up the conventional PC beyond the wildest dreams of classical wisdom.

QVM will make light of computer resource hungry fields like environmental and climate modelling, determination of protein structure and function, discovery of new drugs, complex industrial simulation and design etc. It will also lead to a host of completely newapplications that inevitably accompany such a major computational advance.

Sipho cannot wait to publish a paper in a high impact international journal giving full details of QVM principles and design. He also intends to place a full software implementation on the Internet, allowing anyone to download and use it on a standard PC. No license fee, no royalties. They can use the software as they please –learn from it, modify it – as long as they do not repackage and sell it for private commercial gain and attempt to stop others from using the free distribution.

His friends are horrified – he could license QVM to a global computer company and make a fortune. The university is horrified – it could license QVM to a global computer company and make a fortune. His supervisor is horrified…

But Sipho stands his ground. He firmly believes in the freedom (or should that be obligation?) to publish academic work supported by public funds – software included. His own research benefited immensely from the use of software distributed under similar conditions.

He is also mindful of a moral obligation to seek the greatest economic gain for the country from publicly funded research. But this only strengthens his resolve. He is convinced that greater benefit can accrue to South Africa’s scientific and economic fortunes through his suggested route than by surrendering such a major scientific breakthrough wholesale to any single company, whether it is foreign (almost certainly) or local.

“Is he very foolish or simply ahead of the game, like he is in his research?” his friends puzzle. “Is he really acting in the country’s best interest or is he a well-meaning but naïve academic?” wonders the inquiring public. “Should a man like this even be allowed a choice on the matter?” fumes the university’s deputy vice chancellor for research.

FUNEKA’S AWAKENING

Funeka is a schoolteacher with a mission: to give her dusty, rural school the very best. She launches a campaign to build a computer lab and approaches various businesses for help. To her delight, one company donates 20 computers that are being replaced, but the company will keep all their software licenses for their new machines. She also has to find her own educational
software.

Delight turns to horror when she discovers that it will cost many thousands of Rand for software licenses, including licensing the educational software the dealer tells her she needs. To make matters worse, casual inspection reveals that the content is geared to American schools, using unfamiliar baseball metaphors and the like.

Meantime, Funeka’s students have been doing some legwork of their own. They have contacted a young IT company that has offered to network the computers and connect them to the Internet. When the company’s network guru calls by and finds computers with no software, she installs Linux and associated free software on all of them, sets up the network and Internet connection and even gives the students a preliminary driving lesson on using the software and surfing the Internet.

While Funeka agonises over raising a software budget, the students spend many days probing, exploring and discovering new things. Within a short time they have learned to do creative projects by searching the Internet and sending email around the world for facts they can’ find in the tiny school library. Using tools and examples from other Web sites, they soon start designing their own school Web site and developing content like a Web-based newspaper covering school and local community issues.

When she learns of all this, Funeka is amazed at the creativity of her students, and decides that her original idea of what computers should do is completely wrong. She had thought of the computer as just another passive medium of instruction. Funeka quickly adapts to this awakening, and promptly arranges a session on the Internet – given by her students to members of staff. They are all amazed that all this has happened without the school having to pay a cent in software licenses.

They also heartily approve when the students explain their plans to design a community resource for guided access to government Web sites. The one concern the students have is that they are often unable to read files downloaded from government sites. The problematic files are in a format that requires proprietary software to read.

I begge tilfælde er scenarierne særdeles realistiske. Det er egentlig ret meget ude af trit med almindelig akademisk skik, at universiteterne kan finde på at sælge vigtige ideer til det private erhversliv, for slet ikke at tale om at patentere dem. Hvad Sipho gør, er det eneste oplagte og det bedste for såvel Sydafrika som hele verden, men desværre er det ikke sådan, det altid går.

Og hvis skolerne baserer sig på fri software, kan de både undgå store udgifter til licenser og få langt bedre muligheder for at tilpasse systemerne til deres egne lokale behov. I Sydafrika betyder det ikke mindst, at man kan få lokale virksomheder eller sågar frivillige til at hjælpe til med at oversætte programmerne til et af de elleve officielle sprog. Så behøver man heller ikke vente på, at Microsoft eller de andre store leverandører tager sig sammen til at levere en oversat version – med fri software kan man altid oversætte programmet selv, hvis man har lyst.

Eksemplerne er mange og lærerige, og det var slet heller ingen skade til, om  en dansk politiker eller to også kastede et blik på denne rapport.

Link: Free/Libre and Open Source Software and Open Standards in South Africa. A Critical Issue for Addressing the Digital Divide

http://www.nacinnovation.biz/wp-content/uploads/pdf/NACI%20Resources%20studies,%20reports%20and%20publications/2002/Libre%20&%20Open%20Source%202002.pdf

Libyen og Syrien – dobbeltmoral og moral

hr. k via vhs:

Politiken 16. marts om Libyen:

Europa kan ikke se passivt til, mens voldsomme overgreb på civile finder sted i vores eget nærområde. (…)

Militærmagten kan ikke skabe et nyt demokratisk regime, men drabene på civile kan i det mindste standses.

Politiken 7. maj om Syrien:

Vi kan og skal ikke gribe ind i konflikten militært, og vi kan og skal ikke blive en central aktør i det opgør, der forestår. Vi ved, at der blandt oprørerne er vidt forskellige kræfter, og at der blandt dem er elementer, vi ikke sympatiserer med.

Dobbeltmoral er fint nok, hvis det er for at slå færrest mulige ihjel i sidste ende ved ikke at ‘gribe ind’ – netop af hensynet; at hindre civile i at dø. Men var overvejelser om de menneskelige omkostninger ved en lang borgerkrig i Libyen med i disse overvejelser, eller var det for tungt at tænke på, at en enkelt massakre var at foretrække? Drejede det sig i virkeligheden igen om vores egen moralske forfængelighed og ikke om brune mennesker har det godt eller dårligt?

Link: Dagens dobbeltmoral