After reading this article on Slate, I was suddenly reminded of my salad days in Chicago when I was so broke I couldn’t afford toilet paper.

What’s a boy to do?

Easy. Order yourself a free Book Of Mormon — nice and soft on a crap-rimmed anus.

Just leave the book on top of the toilet and rip off a few pages at a time. Plus you get the added satisfaction of knowing that rich people in Utah are paying you to wipe your ass.

A massive blackout plunged most of Colombia into darkness today, halting trading on the Bogota stock exchange and turning congested city traffic into gridlock.

The blackout is blamed on a fault at a hydroelectric power plant near the southern city of Pasto. It remains unclear whether the fault was accidental or caused by the FARC, who have a heavy guerrilla presence in the region.

The blackout affected all the major cities of Colombia from the Ecuadorian border to Cartagena on the Caribbean coast. The eastern border region of Colombia was not affected, as electricity there is imported from a hydro scheme in western Venezuela.

The power went out roughly around 10am local time. Although official reports claim power was restored by 12noon, power even now remains sporadic throughout the country, as power is restored city by city, neighborhood by neighborhood.

For more coverage, see the Associated Press or Reuters. For some especially bad reporting, see the BBC, who report the outage affected only southern Colombia.

Wake up America! The house is fucking burning already!

From The Guardian:

“From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.”

I recently finished reading Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s incredibly over-hyped and under-written novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Like sifting through a ton of cow shit to find a diamond, there is this one nugget of inspiration:

“Kitsch” is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century, and from German it entered all Western languages. Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

Two pages later he nails it:

    Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!
    The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
    It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

He then proceeds to unwittingly describe modern America:

Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality; the artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.

The true function of kitsch is to prevent the self-examination that Camus highlighted when he said that “the only true philosophical question is suicide.” Yet kitsch is inescapable, and will haunt others in our deaths.

    What remains of the dying population of Cambodia?
    One large photograph of an American actress holding an Asian child in her arms.
    What remains of Tomas?
    An inscription reading HE WANTED THE KINGDOM OF GOD ON EARTH.
    What remains of Beethoven?
    A frown, an improbably mane, and an somber voice intoning Es muss sein! [It must be!]
    What remains of Franz?
    An inscription reading A RETURN AFTER LONG WANDERINGS.
    And so on and so forth. Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

Like many people, I have increasingly got in the habit of using Wikipedia as my first source of online information. An incident has made me question that habit.

Recently I was treated to a delightful performance by the dengue virus. While sick and suspecting it was dengue, I checked out the Wikipedia entry for the disease, which reads, “Dengue is transmitted to humans by the Aedes aegypti (rarely Aedes albopictus) mosquito. This mosquito tends to bite just after dawn and just before sunset.” (my emphasis)

Except this is bullshit. I was bitten sometime between 12noon and 2pm. Further research reveals that the World Health Organization says the virus is borne by “day-time biting” mosquitoes — not just at dawn and dusk.

So being a good soldier I went to the Wikipedia entry and changed the entry to contain the correct information: you can, in fact, get dengue at anytime during the day. I returned the next day and it had been changed back. I changed it again, this time with an explanatory note; again, within hours, it had been changed back.

This incident made it clear to me for the first time just how much of Wikipedia is, in fact, run by doctrinal zealots with a torch to burn in their ivory tower, people less interested in the truth than in staking a claim for their egos.

Verdict: whoever is willing to fight most and spend the most time editing and re-editing Wikipedia will be the person to tell his version of the truth.

Question: does that make it a reliable source of information?

The Fascist State desires to have citizens of a certain type: namely,
obedient. A questioning, wondering, thinking citizenry is by definition
a threat to the Fascist State.

The thing we must remember, also, is that in general fascism is
something the majority of people desire: they wish to be ruled by a
strong hand, they wish to obey, they wish to lose the omnipresent
burden of self and the painful options of choice available in a truly
free society.

Computers, I am beginning to think, and specifically computer games, are
a cultural expression of a desire to give up free will and be ruled by
autocratic fascist forces.

Let’s consider the model of most computer games. The player must go on a
virtual journey, killing monsters, collecting valuables, advancing
levels, and finally defeat some evil baddie at the end in order to win
and make it into the list of high scores.

At each step the player must do only one of a very few things or his
character, his avatar, will die. A computer game is generally not a
venue for creativity, but for learning specific response mechanisms,
without which the player’s avatar will most certainly die.

(It should be noted there are a very few computer games that do involve
and encourage creativity; but their lack of popularity proves my point:
no one wants to think during his time off.)

Consider the effect this sort of learning has on the human mind,
especially the developing young mind. The lesson is clear: to succeed
and get ahead, there is a narrow band of options that will take you to
the top. Any deviation, any creativity, anything resembling free
thinking or exploration will lead to inevitable failure.

Computer games are also highly addictive. They are designed to be. You
always want more. Dying only makes you want to play again and get
further ahead, like a lab rat in a maze, obediently solving the puzzle,
all for the sake of a digital piece of cheese that does not even exist
in the real world.

It is as though an XBox were some sort of pagan deity, before which we
sit cross-legged, bowed, as though in worship or prayer, with a joystick
(the word: a joy stick!) between our legs, attempting to please the
god-in-a-box, receiving a steady IV drip of calmative anti-psychotic
digital drug each time we kill a monster or collect some virtual
treasure.

This is true of computer use in general as well. The convergence of
fictional computer games and computer-aided real life should not be
underestimated. Information in general now becomes that anti-psychotic
drug: what else can explain the unbearable itch to check your email
every five minutes?

Why waste hours chatting on instant messenger when you could pick up the
phone and just call the person? With skype you can call anywhere in the
world for about $.02/minute — is it really “just to save money” that
you IM? Or is it to spend time, to get rid of time, to force the digital
hour hand to move faster, to obliterate the hours that might otherwise
be spent thinking unspeakable thoughts, engaged in the horror of self-
examination?

There is, of course, no ultimate satisfaction to be found in computer
games, any more than television or summer movies provide the catharsis
of true drama. The aim of all three — computer games, television, and
the summer blockbuster — is to leave you wanting more, craving more,
tickled but, at bottom, never ultimately satisfied.

It is only by putting the citizen on a hamster wheel of always-craving-
more than he can be kept tame, kept down, kept submissive.

This sort of entertainment, or rather, propaganda, creates the sort of
citizen the United States of America wants: obedient, unreflective,
compliant individuals who don’t ask questions, salute the flag, and
worship Jesus. Hallelujah.

– this essay originally appeared at www.jensporup.com/essays.

Web advertising sucks. Fortunately, there is an easy way for you non-techies to squash most of it: Firefox’s Adblock plug-in. (Geeks may prefer to use privoxy and tor.)

Adblock by default blocks all the main advertising banner sources, like doubleclick.net, etc. Its real functionality, however, lies in your ability to customize it and teach it what are ads and what aren’t, and thereby reduce your online visual clutter.

Suppose you are reading the Guardian online. You see an annoying ad image. So, with Adblock installed, you right-click on the image and select “Adblock Image”.

It will offer you something that looks like this:

http://ads.guardian.co.uk/$%rgkfdGSER%^234rTGRE$%6__SOME_JUNK_HERE

You don’t need to worry about what all that junk at the end means, but you have to get rid of it. The reason is this: Adblock will block only exactly what you tell it to. So if a single digit of that junk is different, it won’t get blocked the second time around.

So what you do is this. Delete all that junk so that the url looks like this:

http://ads.guardian.co.uk/

now add an asterisk (’*') at the end, like so:

http://ads.guardian.co.uk/*

The asterisk (for you non-geeks) means “match any and all junk that follows.” The above test will block everything that comes from ads.guardian.co.uk, thus delivering to you all the bounteous content the Guardian has to offer without the annoying ads or the need to register to see their ad-free site.

America’s long and painful decline into fascism is masked by a spirit of hypocrisy: Orwellian terms enter our lexicon, where “freedom” means “obedience” and “defence” means “war of aggression” and truth has become so muddled that rather than try to untwist all the lies we merely take sides with people who look like us, or who live near us, or who fall roughly into the same socio-economic background as us.

So it is that this little piece of bald-faced news escaped most people’s attention last October: Congress has given the President the right to deploy troops on American soil and to commandeer control of the National Guard from the various states’ governors. There is a word for this: it is martial law.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) wrote at the time:

“We certainly do not need to make it easier for Presidents to declare martial law. Invoking the Insurrection Act and using the military for law enforcement activities goes against some of the central tenets of our democracy. One can easily envision governors and mayors in charge of an emergency having to constantly look over their shoulders while someone who has never visited their communities gives the orders.”

He wrote further:

“The implications of changing the (Posse Comitatus) Act are enormous… There is good reason,” he said, “for the constructive friction in existing law when it comes to martial law declarations. Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy. We fail our Constitution, neglecting the rights of the States, when we make it easier for the President to declare martial law and trample on local and state sovereignty.”

And so both Liberty and Justice, like frogs in the slowly boiling pot of proverb, are cooked alive, leaving behind nothing but a fascist dictatorship, oh-so-thinly disguised as democracy.

See the full article here.

Don’t wait for the six o’clock news! Let Jesus give you his divine inspiration directly!

Everyone knows the threat levels used by the Department of Homeland Insecurity come directly from Jesus himself! With a Threat Alert Jesus in every room of your home, you too will have up-to-the-minute alerts on the political fortunes of the Republicans! (Hint: the higher the threat level, the worse their electoral prospects!)

Get yours now!

Search engines store every search and the corresponding IP address. While they may not know your name, they know every search term you’ve ever entered from the IP address that identifies your home computer.

While it’s not exactly news, this information is very tempting for people who can throw around National Security Letters like candy, and demand search engines turn over their search data.

This is very scary, and is a permanent invasion of your privacy — there is nothing to prevent search engines from saving that data for an infinite period of time, and every reason for them to do so: data mining your personal interests could be very profitable.

Enter Scroogle. Scroogle is a google scraper — hence the name — and acts as a proxy to all your search requests. That means that google only knows that scroogle is making a search request, and not you personally. Plus scroogle deletes all logs within 48 hours, which prevents the search engines from data mining you or the feds from invading and destroying your privacy.

To make things extra easy, there’s now a Firefox plugin (also here) so that you can use Scroogle instead of Google right in your browser window.

There’s no excuse for not protecting your privacy, and if you expect Google or the US government to “just do the right thing” then you’re a fool. Scroogle is a small step in the right direction. Download and install the Firefox plugin and start using it now.

Update: You may have heard that Google are now planning on anonymizing some portions of your search data. After two years. Yippee. Good article here. I draw your attention especially to this quote:

“Google should not be in the spy business. By logging IP addresses and search strings they are running the largest intelligence operation in the world.”

It’s not fair. How come I never hear the bombs when they go off?

Yesterday the talk of the town was the bomb Sunday night that ripped the face off the main Cali police station, less than a kilometer from my house. The car bomb destroyed many surrounding businesses and killed a bunch of cops and an unlucky taxi driver who happened to be driving by.

Of course, the bombers were obviously FARC. The question is why they chose Easter Sunday late at night to blow up a bomb in Cali.

Either it’s because they wanted to make the point that they can still blow shit up when they want to, but didn’t want to kill any civilians in the process (you can’t have a revolution without a sympathetic civilian populace); or, it’s because the only time they felt they could get away with it without getting caught was on a quiet off-night like Easter Sunday night.

I’m just bummed I didn’t hear it go off. Everyone was saying the windows were rattling and the plaster was falling from the ceiling. I must have slept right through it.

Update: There’s Spanish language coverage of the event here, also a good photo of the destroyed building here.

After a long illness it’s as though the whole world appears again in ghastly grey newness, ready to be loathed afresh. So it has been recently after a seemingly-endless bout with that favorite tropical friend and companion, dengue.

How did it began. It was a Monday. How fitting. Even if it was a public holiday. The girlfriend wanted to go for a picnic down by the river. Bah, I said, I hate picnics, and off we went.

An hour’s drive later, we found ourselves among screaming kids, nowhere to sit, flies (and, unnoticed, mosquitoes) galore, and an adjacent paddock full of testicular-challenged colts with what can only be described as a bowl cut for their tails.

Great. We made short work of the sandwiches we’d brought, looked rather sheepishly at each other as yet another ear-splitting yelp of some small humanoid rodent caused us both to wince, and simultaneously began packing up to leave.

So much for that idea, we both said at practically the same time, and went for an ice cream at a nearby shopping center to soothe the annoyance.

The day ended on a real upbeat note, it was the same day my brother emailed to say he had been kidnapped, and finished very late after a telephone conversation with the Colombian anti-kidnapping police (see other post).

The kidnapping incident dragged on, and with it a not entirely unexpected general sense of malaise. It was to be expected; I was under a lot of pressure, it would go away soon.

Except it didn’t. (more…)

It was the Monday of a long weekend when I got the email. “this IS AN EMERGENCY,” it said. “Many lives are at risk… THIS IS NOT A JOKE.” It was a message from my younger brother. He wanted my phone number. I gave it to him.

The phone rang about half an hour later. My brother was in Colombia, in a small mountain town, and had gone to his Colombian girlfriend’s farm for a couple of days, an idyll interrupted when three men showed up claiming to be FARC and demanding fifty million pesos ($25,000) to let them leave town alive.

I had known my brother was travelling in South America and had intended to come to Colombia, but I didn’t know when he was going to arrive.

He was very insistent I tell no one, and that we find a way to convince my father to pay the ransom money. After we hung up my first call was to my girlfriend here in Cali. I told her I couldn’t talk over the phone — my brother was convinced all our phone calls were being tapped — so I asked her to get dressed and come over right away. It was already late.

What do I do, I asked her? Well, she said, there’s risks either way. Many times you pay the FARC a ransom and they kill the hostage anyway. Sometimes you pay the ransom and they sell the hostage to a different guerrilla group, who also demands a ransom. Simply giving them what they wanted was not necessarily the best solution to the problem.

What would you do if you were me, I asked her. I’d call GAULA, she said. GAULA, she explained, was the Colombia anti-kidnapping and extortion squad. There were more kidnappings in Colombia than anywhere else in the world, so GAULA, she argued, were some of the best people in the world to handle this sort of situation.

So we called GAULA. Unfortunately, we didn’t know where my brother was. He had called me from a land line, but I didn’t have caller ID, so it was impossible to know where he was calling from. I did have the IP address from his email but, as we were to discover later, that didn’t help much at all. Come into the office in Cali tomorrow between 7am and 7:30am, said the man on the phone.

I didn’t sleep too well that night. My brother and I are not exactly close — we’d seen each other in Buenos Aires last year for the first time in more than a dozen years — and I hadn’t had a single email from him since. Still, he was my younger brother, and I was responsible for him. My father didn’t know Colombia as I do nor does he speak Spanish, putting the onus squarely on me to get him out, alive.

The next morning my girlfriend and I rocked up to the police station and made it past several sentries to the GAULA office. The office itself, far from suggesting burly men with guns who rescue hostages, was replete with blue cubicles punctuated by the occasional meeting table. It could have been the head office of a grocery store in Boise.

Two men eventually greeted us and sat down. What was my brother’s financial situation, they wanted to know. What did he do for a living. Well, he was a poor backpacker who I thought had done some English teaching work in BA. They looked at each other significantly. Are you sure this isn’t a hoax? We deal with a lot of fake kidnappings, self-kidnappings, stuff like that. You say you don’t know your brother really well. Is it possible this is some sort of a joke?

I think about this. The thought had, in fact, crossed my mind. Was it simply a ruse to burn my dad for twenty-five grand? But then, the kid was definitely scared. No one can act that well. He was definitely afraid for his life.

No, I said. It is possible, yes, but I consider it highly unlikely. I gave them my USB key, which contained a downloaded copy of my brother’s email, with all the routing headers showing. This was passed off to a Colombian geek to process. Meanwhile, we stared at the opposite cubicle wall, and my girlfriend and I gossipped about the various boob jobs and outfits on the women in the office.

Finally the word comes back: the email was sent from an email cafe so remote that it was routed through a satellite link. Only one company offered that service in Colombia. They were a private company based in Bogota, and it would take eight days for them to process the government’s request.

My brother had been told he had only five days left to live. (more…)