First World Progress by mdumlao98 on Flickr

All day today I felt like a kid on the first day of school. Everything seemed new, I wanted to learn and do so much, and I was—funny that this has become to boilerplate to say—freaking hopeful.

As I’ve said before, I was a bit disappointed that I couldn’t be in the U.S. for this one. But walking around Jhongli today, I got thumbs up and wide grins from strangers. I ordered a lunch to go and the guy behind the counter pointed at the TV and said, “Obama!”

I concurred wholeheartedly.

My Taiwanese friends have been asking me what it feels like to have a black president. They don’t ask because they think it’s a big deal themselves, they ask because they’ve read that we Americans think it’s a big deal. Maybe it is, I don’t know. This election has never been about race to me. I think it’s fair to say that while it might be about race for many pro-Obama Americans, I think it’s more a racial matter for some anti-Obama Americans.

I’ll never forget how I lost my breath seeing the main page of the New York Times today:

Yes, I did select that picture to contrast the headline, because they had a nice little embedded applet for browsing pictures. So it’s not the New York Times’s message, but still, the juxtaposition of profound change and staunch, petulant conservatism really resonated with me. Maybe this will be a rocky start. Maybe it won’t be.

What I felt today reminded me of what I saw from the world immediately after 9/11. People looked at me on the street and wanted to share joy. “You’re America! Remember: we love you.” It was like they knew all along that we would do the right thing. They weren’t afraid at all.

There are many things America means to me. I don’t think lack of fear is necessarily one of them, but hope definitely is.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to have a beer with my friends.

In some ways, I’m sad to be away in a different country while this happens in the U.S. (Don’t worry, I voted via absentee ballot!) The joy welling up in me is something I very much want to share with my friends and family in the States, and it’s something that my Taiwanese friends very much respect and admire, but cannot understand, just as I could not hope to fully appreciate their hatred of their last president for betraying them.

Some Americans I know here in Taiwan are trying to withhold themselves from premature revelry, perhaps out of fear of jinxing Obama’s win. Yes, he’ll likely win, they say, but what if he doesn’t? They say they wouldn’t be able to deal with the disappointment.

But I look at it this way. Now is the time when the cheering should be loudest. It’s home team advantage. You give your man all you’ve got, and yell yourself hoarse as he comes down the home stretch. Trepidation now can cost the world so very much.

This weekend I was reminded of this lesson when I faced what was to me a deplorable lack of world understanding. It’s been ages since I’ve logged onto Facebook, but I thought I would give it a go and see if I could get in touch with any blueshifting friends—or acquaintances, I suppose, because I have an e-mail address for pretty much anyone I’d ever call “friend.”

I was met with the discussion that follows. Of course I couldn’t help but chime in. I warn you that at parts it reads like a series of YouTube comments, and at others like an introductory logic course.

At times in that discussion I think I was a real prick. That’s typical of me, and while perhaps not the best method, I do think there’s something to be said for shaming individuals into self-reflection. Some are more susceptible to this technique than others, of course, but I’ve seen some deep moments happen in other people when undergoing ridicule. I know I’ve experienced such magic myself.

Here’s to tomorrow. Raise your glass with me, won’t you? And don’t forget to debate!

On a related note, my goal in life is to express every desire with deadpan sarcasm.

This has been a very regular occurrence since I got to Germany. It’s legal for the cops to just frisk anyone on the street, for any reason, and I get that treatment a lot. If I’m meeting friends some place, they’ll often give me 20 minutes beyond the scheduled meeting time, because chances are, I’m going to get controlled somewhere along the way.

What happened yesterday was that I was on the tram, in the rearmost car, and I decided I was going to get off. Typical protocol is that everyone outside the tram waits for people to get off, then they pile in. I was at the back of the line to exit, and since it was a heavily trafficked stop (Munich Central Station), there was a risk the tram was going to start moving again, and I’d be stuck having to walk a stop back.

As I reach the door to exit, two police officers are trying to get onto the train. I figure whatever they have to do is somewhat important, so I want to make sure they get on before the doors close and seal everybody in. They were rudely getting on side-by-side, as well, meaning I couldn’t walk out next to them. I hestitate and motion them inwards, they don’t respond, so I move to get out, and then they try again to come on, together, blocking my exit.

The conversation went like this:

Me: “Are you getting on or not?”
Cop #1, with one foot on the tram: “Maybe. Would it be a problem if I did?”
Me: “What? Look, I was just waiting on you. Whatever.”

Then I shouldered by them, as I had maybe a second or two left before the doors locked me in, and they followed me back off the tram, Cop #1 already donning leather frisking gloves.

I heave a big sigh and roll my eyes.

Cop #1: “Identification, please. Are you carrying any illegal substances, such as drugs or weapons, on your person or in your bag?
Me: “Of course not. I think I might have a pretzel in my backpack, but that’s the worst you’re going to find.”
Cop #2: “Identification, please.”

I hand over my Pennsylvania driver’s license and begin emptying my pockets. (I definitely know the drill by now. It’s illegal for them to reach into my pockets, so I have to empty them myself and then turn them inside out, otherwise they have probable cause to take me down to the station.)

Cop #1: “Start with the front pockets, please. Everything out.”
Cop #2: “Identification, please.”
Me: “Are you really going to keep asking me?”
Cop #2: “This isn’t identification. This is a driver’s license.”
Me: “That’s government issued. It counts as ID.”
Cop #1: “No, all it does is prove that you can drive a car. We need identification.”
Me: “In America, you have to provide a social security number to receive a driver’s license. It’s used as ID. Very few Americans have a passport.”
Cop #1: “Did you use this driver’s license at the airport when you came to Germany?”
Me: “No, of course not. I used my passport. I don’t carry that with me because it’s too valuable.”
Cop #2: “You have to carry your passport with you at all times.”
Me: “No, I don’t. I have to carry ID. That’s ID.”
Cop #1: “Next pocket, please. Turn that one all the way inside-out.”
Cop #2: “So you’re not registered as living here, are you?”
Me: “Of course I am. I’ve lived here since September.”
Cop #2: “Under what name are you registered with the city?”
Me: [bored stare]
Cop #2: [looks at driver's license] “Where is your passport?”
Me: “Back at my place. I keep it there so it’s safe. Like, for example, if I go drinking or something. I don’t want to lose it. [I know that sounds like stiff, awkward English, but that's exactly what my German sounded like]

The frisking process was especially laborious because I’d just come from doing a tour. I had about ten thousand sets of keys for all the bike locks, I had tools like wrenches and multitools, a mini tire pump, and a large amount of cash in crumpled bills, which I had collected as payment and needed to get to my boss.

When Cop #1 began to search my backpack, she did indeed find half a massive pretzel I’d stuffed in there while drinking at the Chinese Tower with the tour group. (I couldn’t finish it because I’d been drinking heavily the night before and hadn’t gotten my appetite back.)

The best part was when she had me empty my cargo pockets, which is where all the tools were, and asked me to turn those inside out. Have you ever tried to turn cargo pockets on shorts inside out? It doesn’t really work. I kind of just rolled my shorts up, towards the inside, so it looked like I had been really hungover that morning and decided knickers were a good idea, but couldn’t quite nail the execution.

These poor officers did not want to give up. They were sure I had something. I’d gotten off the train at a weird time. I’d acted deferentially to them instead of ignoring them, which was suspicious. I had a death metal t-shirt on, and my hair down. I had a very bizarre looking backpack.

They eventually did give up. I got my pretzel back, but I still haven’t eaten it.

I just wanted to share a great parody of the “Yes We Can” video, ripping on McCain for being a nutso hawk.

Great stuff, isn’t it? The “Bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran” comment was especially hip.

Somewhat recently I stumbled across an article that documents in slice-of-life fashion just how erudite Obama is.

No presidential candidate in history — not the polymath Thomas Jefferson, not the orator William Jennings Bryan, not the egghead Adlai Stevenson — has ever uttered a sentence like this: “My mother was an anthropologist [and] the Margaret Mead reference I’m always hip to.”

I found that pretty funny. It’s so calculatedly casual that it wins me over. The guy’s obviously very bright and extremely well-spoken, but neither of those things is fun without a gloss of humor to round out the package.

On that subject, Huckabee is doing a damn good job advertising his sense of humor, as he’s appeared on The Colbert Report three or four times already, and recently The Daily Show, too. Even though he’s cooked squirrel in a popcorn popper, the guy is charismatic, and isn’t afraid to showcase his ability to toss jokes back and forth with and it’s doing him well.

But I’ve heard nothing out of him to indicate that he’s hip to Margaret Mead.

16. Chris Matthews

Charges: Calling his show “Hardball” is like rechristening ping-pong “Thermonuclear Warfare.” Displays the slurred, unmodulated speech and unfocused antagonism of an aggrieved middle-management drunk. Can read a scurrilous political attack into any paragraph at twenty paces. Continues honing his pointless questions as his guests attempt to answer, cutting them off with an affected imperial weariness when their responses are insufficiently inane. Apparently ignorant of the implications of satellite technology, Matthews shouts louder at geographically more distant guests. Has repeatedly called Ann Coulter “brilliant.” Referred to Gerald Ford’s yuletide demise as the former president’s “Christmas card to the country.” Unable to laugh like a normal human, Matthews compensates by simply shouting “ha!”

Exhibit A: “This country is based on generalizations!”

Sentence: Hillary’s White House Press Secretary and personal toilet steward.

13. Anne Coulter

Charges: A skeletal freak who hates the world and lives to anger people into buying her books. Says Jews need to be “perfected,” as if Christians are in better shape. Is against her own right to vote. Called John Edwards a faggot, when really he’s just a little swishy. Is about as sexy as a praying mantis. If Coulter were a man, she’d never be allowed on TV.

Exhibit A: “Faggot isn’t offensive to gays; it’s got nothing to do with gays.”

Sentence: Forced marriage to Osama bin Laden.

9. You

Charges: You believe in freedom of speech, until someone says something that offends you. You suddenly give a damn about border integrity, because the automated voice system at your pharmacy asked you to press 9 for Spanish. You cling to every scrap of bullshit you can find to support your ludicrous belief system, and reject all empirical evidence to the contrary. You know the difference between patriotism and nationalism — it’s nationalism when foreigners do it. You hate anyone who seems smarter than you. You care more about zygotes than actual people. You love to blame people for their misfortunes, even if it means screwing yourself over. You still think Republicans favor limited government. Your knowledge of politics and government are dwarfed by your concern for Britney Spears’ children. You think buying Chinese goods stimulates our economy. You think you’re going to get universal health care. You tolerate the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques.” You think the government is actually trying to improve education. You think watching CNN makes you smarter. You think two parties is enough. You can’t spell. You think $9 trillion in debt is manageable. You believe in an afterlife for the sole reason that you don’t want to die. You think lowering taxes raises revenue. You think the economy’s doing well. You’re an idiot.

Exhibit A: You couldn’t get enough Anna Nicole Smith coverage.

Sentence: A gradual decline into abject poverty as you continue to vote against your own self-interest. Death by an easily treated disorder that your health insurance doesn’t cover. You deserve it, chump.

This thing really made my entire night. I kept trying to get other things done, kept trying to save a bit of it for later, but I read straight through from 50 to 1, pausing only to paste snippets to friends online.

Please do check it out. I want this guy to have tons of traffic, because I assume he’s using ads on his page, and I wasn’t able to find an address to which I could just mail a check. Because I seriously would.

The other day, while I was doing a little research on Jean Shepherd, I came across some great political cartoons archived in Time Magainze. I think I liked them because they all played on the fact that this election has some pretty slim pickin’s.

Not bad. Really, I’m not motivated to vote for any one of these losers. Getting Gore back would pretty much rock, but instead the only latecomer we’re going to have this year is going to be Bloomberg. I’d be tempted to vote for him if he has the balls to run as independent, just to show that I hate the electoral college. But if Huckabee is still going strong in the polls, then I won’t dick around. I’ll vote for Obama like a good little Democrat.

Of course, since I’m making a blog entry about politics, it’s mandated that I mention Ron Paul. Otherwise I’d lose my internet card. Ron Paul is a crackpot Constitutionalist douchebag whose entire platform is just saying “No” to everything. To everything! No to war is good, but no to financial aid for education is very, very bad. OK, you’re right, it wasn’t in the Constitution, but that argument is eerily like “but it ain’t in the Bible!” to my ears. Times change, and literature is literature, regardless of whether people choose to live and die by the document immortalizing it.

Honestly, despite all the antics on Digg to get Ron Paul attention, he’s doomed to obscurity as Howard Dean 2.0. Remember in 2004, how galvanized the entire internet was to get that guy in office? Then actual voting took place, and nobody got off their ass to vote for him? Yeah. Kind of happened in Iowa already, I guess. Just read some of the things Ron Paul has to say.

The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders’ political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs. Certainly the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both replete with references to God, would be aghast at the federal government’s hostility to religion.

I just blinked a lot when I read that. I couldn’t even get angry. It’s just so bizarrely inaccurate that it seems I should focus more on checking whether gravity still exists than trying to correct this deranged old man. I mean, if a person can come to believe this, I do honestly question whether the laws of physics will hold until the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November this year.

Oh, well. Obama isn’t such a loser, I guess.

This video was posted yesterday by Al Jazeera English, which should further improve the band’s already rather high profile. If the hit counter on the band’s homepage is to be believed, they’ve already had over 70 million hits in just two years. Pretty impressive.Indeed, the band commands a remarkable internet presence, with Wikipedia entries in English, Polish, and German (no surprise there), an entry in the Encyclopaedia Metallum, a Last.fm artist page, and a peppering of of articles by major news outlets, such as NPR and BBC. There are even several articles in the WSJ about the band, which I can’t provide here given their stupid subscription model, but one of them was fortunately covered by Blabbermouth and quoted at length.

“When ACRASSICAUDA ripped into a furious version of METALLICA’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ at a recent concert, dozens of fans rushed the stage, jerked their heads to the music and slam-danced.

“Midway through the set, a portly club official took the stage and ordered the crowd to sit down. The band ignored him and kept playing, and around 50 of the roughly 200 fans remained standing. The official ended the concert and angrily escorted the band off the stage. Faisal Talal, the band’s singer and rhythm guitarist, shouted a string of profanities, drawing cheers from the crowd.

“It was a classic moment of rock ‘n’ roll rebellion, but such gestures come at a high price in Iraq. The venues that ACRASSICAUDA — which may be Iraq’s only heavy-metal band — played before the war are now government compounds or off-limits because of street crime. The staid Iraqi Hunting Club, which hosted the aborted concert, says the band won’t be allowed back. The group hasn’t found a new venue.

“‘It’s never been harder for us to play our music, but there’s also never been so much of a need for it,’ says Mr. Talal, 21 years old. ‘There’s a lot to be angry about these days, and we want to give people a way to get that out.’”

Now, what’s very unfortunate is that the documentary mentioned in the Al Jazeera English video above is absolutely unattainable. Pretty sure it does in fact exist, seeing as its site claims it earned “official selection” at the Toronto International Film Festival this year. I guess this fame resulted in a lower visibility for the movie, seeing as this Blabbermouth article links to the video on an online distribution channel, VBS.tv, and the link now just shows the VBS.tv’s main page. This curious removal of content was brought up in the VBS.tv forums, only to have the thread locked. To top it off, the YouTube video link in the article also says the clip has been removed.

The trailer for the film, of course, is sprinkled all over the internet.

The movie’s page over at IMDB doesn’t offer much information, but does credit “VBS.TV” as the company behind the work. The single review written of the movie is by someone who claims to have actually attended the Toronto International Film Festival.I wish the band a solid discography and healthy tour cycle. I hope they don’t have to stay away from their families for too long.

Digg the Al Jazeera video or check out the band’s MySpace.

No matter how many times I walk down a certain street in the city, I can always expect to see new planters and sculptures and fountains being set up—maybe winter is the time for additions to be unveiled in spring.

Today I saw an article in The Onion about Opposite World, namely America.

Nation’s Crumbling Infrastructure Probably Some Sort Of Metaphor

The tragic Minneapolis bridge collapse that left 13 dead this August brought national attention to the country’s crumbling infrastructure, forcing many to question whether the nation’s rapidly deteriorating roads, contaminated drinking water and groundwater, and run-down schools could perhaps be a metaphor for something.

[...]

“I think our overstretched and increasingly obsolete infrastructure might symbolize something important,” Perry added. “But what?”

Hooboy. That is pretty well said.

I’ll be heading to Berlin this weekend, enjoying the meticulous smoothness of the autobahn on the way. At least once there, Berlin’s drab former Soviet Bloc countenance will remind me of home in a gently depressing way, conjuring up mute thoughts of empires lying in ruin.

Just last week, a U.S. federal judge ruled that the court could not demand that a man accused of transporting child pornography across state lines divulge the passphrase for his encrypted hard drive.

Especially if this ruling is appealed, U.S. v. Boucher could become a landmark case. The question of whether a criminal defendant can be legally compelled to cough up his encryption passphrase remains an unsettled one, with law review articles for the last decade arguing the merits of either approach. (A U.S. Justice Department attorney wrote an article in 1996, for instance, titled “Compelled Production of Plaintext and Keys.”)

This debate has been one of analogy and metaphor. Prosecutors tend to view PGP passphrases as akin to someone possessing a key to a safe filled with incriminating documents. That person can, in general, be legally compelled to hand over the key. Other examples include the U.S. Supreme Court saying that defendants can be forced to provide fingerprints, blood samples, or voice recordings.

This is a fascinating legal issue to me, and is a crucial watershed at a time when privacy is being ripped limb from limb in America. If this case stands on appeal, it will be a phenomenal step forward for encryption in the public sphere. I like to think that the ruling being upheld on appeal would generate a lot of press coverage, which might lead to increased public interest in personal encryption schemes, whether for hard drives or internet communication.

In discussing this miraculous (though not yet definite) precedent with some friends here, one girl I spoke with acted very confused, and said, “But what if he was doing something bad? Then the police couldn’t read his files and send him to jail.” She was American.

In ernst, there will be a lot of people using this technology to hide their involvement in illegal activities. But there will also be people using encryption to hide their innocent yet sensitive data from theft and exploitation. If the encryption is sophisticated enough, it should stand up to datamining attempts at Langley. It should mask the content of communication well enough to foster what is typically considered unsavory political discussions.

It’s difficult for me to explain how very, very important I find it that communication remain discrete and private while the profusion of nodes of communication multiplies. Technologically it’s quite feasible, but unfortunately the cultural ingredients are not yet present in much of the world, most likely because most people simply don’t understand the systems they interact with every day.

But there are parties hard at work to prevent the widespread adoption of content-masking encryption schemes. Who they are isn’t immediately obvious, but it’s not hard to infer if you pay attention to major players in the tech industry. For instance, Wired recently covered a very compelling oddity in the new Dual_EC_DRBG encryption standard, which was published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (130-page PDF here).

In an informal presentation at the CRYPTO 2007 conference in August, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson showed that the algorithm contains a weakness that can only be described a backdoor.

This is how it works: There are a bunch of constants — fixed numbers — in the standard used to define the algorithm’s elliptic curve. These constants are listed in Appendix A of the NIST publication, but nowhere is it explained where they came from.

What Shumow and Ferguson showed is that these numbers have a relationship with a second, secret set of numbers that can act as a kind of skeleton key. If you know the secret numbers, you can predict the output of the random-number generator after collecting just 32 bytes of its output. To put that in real terms, you only need to monitor one TLS internet encryption connection in order to crack the security of that protocol. If you know the secret numbers, you can completely break any instantiation of Dual_EC_DRBG.

Not to be pedantic, but this should scare you. The U.S. government is very probably engineering and propagating faulty encryption standards. One might say that this in itself isn’t particularly heinous, given that the flaw has been exposed, and should therefore never enjoy substantial implementation. Cue the toolbags over at Microsoft, who list among the security updates for Vista Service Pack 1 the same nasty Dual EC standard.

Strengthens the cryptography platform with a redesigned random number generator, which leverages the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), when present, for entropy and complies with the latest standards. The redesigned RNG uses the AES-based pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) from NIST Special Publication 800-90 by default. The Dual Elliptical Curve (Dual EC) PRNG from SP 800-90 is also available for customers who prefer to use it.

Oh dear. This news comes a year and a half after a Microsoft cryptographer swore no such move would ever be made.

“The suggestion is that we are working with governments to create a back door so that they can always access BitLocker-encrypted data,” Niels Ferguson, a developer and cryptographer at Microsoft, wrote Thursday on a corporate blog. “Over my dead body,” he wrote in his post titled “Back-door nonsense.”

Notice anything funny? That March 2006 quote is by Niels Ferguson, the same cryptographer who presented on the flaws of Dual_EC_DRBG at the CRYPTO 2007 conference. And yet Microsoft is still going ahead with the implementation of this broken algorithm, despite the objections of cryptographers around the world and its own employees.

When I noticed Ferguson cropping up on both sides of the playing field, I tried to do a little more research on him. For some reason his homepage is redirecting to a spam pharmaceuticals page. Searching on the Microsoft Developer Network blog doesn’t seem to yield any posts by Ferguson more recent than September 2006, but the search functionality is horrendous and frustrating, so I may have missed something.

I don’t know what to make of this yet, but I’m interesting in learning more about Ferguson. I know he’s collaborated heavily with eminent cryptographer Bruce Schneier, so I’ll have to look up some of their papers together. In the meantime, I’m incredibly suspicious, and I’m going to start locking up my data with more trusted, peer-reviewed encryption techniques. I highly recommend you do the same.

H. Res. 847: Recognizing the importance of Christmas and the Christian faith

RESOLUTION
Recognizing the importance of Christmas and the Christian faith.Whereas Christmas, a holiday of great significance to Americans and many other cultures and nationalities, is celebrated annually by Christians throughout the United States and the world;[...]

Whereas Christians identify themselves as those who believe in the salvation from sin offered to them through the sacrifice of their savior, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and who, out of gratitude for the gift of salvation, commit themselves to living their lives in accordance with the teachings of the Holy Bible;

Whereas Christians and Christianity have contributed greatly to the development of western civilization;

Whereas the United States, being founded as a constitutional republic in the traditions of western civilization, finds much in its history that points observers back to its roots in Christianity;

[...]

Whereas for Christians, Christmas is celebrated as a recognition of God’s redemption, mercy, and Grace;

Splendid! This is what we need to show the world that we’re up to snuff on cultural awareness, and that we’re ready to integrate with a global community, welcoming the exchange of beliefs and ideas.

Also, it shows a truly astounding grasp of history, and the resolution contains nothing which would make the Founding Fathers vomit in fits of shaking rage.

This pseudo-legislative über-canvassing turd has already passed through the House, with bipartisan support.

I’m going to ask my Norwegian friends to confirm the truth of this, but given how badass I already know the country to be, I believe it.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman said: “It even will superimpose infra-red imagery on to the visor to allow the pilot to look through the cockpit floor at night and see the world below – like something out of Terminator.”

I assume the feature creep on the development of the F-35 will lead to allowing the planes to fly with laser guns permanently switched on. Because that’s awesome.

Thanks, J.

I mean, didn’t anybody involved in the project see the Terminator movies?

I guess the real question is whether this dopey name was chosen out of complete ignorance, or perhaps selected to strike fear in the hearts of enemies. If the latter, kind of makes the UK look like a dude in a dynamite vest screaming in the café of international politics, but hey, I guess you gotta keep up with current trends in military strategy.

Also, pretty sure I saw that bugger in the opening scene of Rise Of The Machines, where robots are slaughtering the meager remains of humanity, dashing their meaty bodies against the stones and flying around with laser guns constantly firing, because that’s cool.

“The military mission is not as easily defined as it used to be,” said George A. Pruitt, president of Thomas Edison State College, which, along with Burlington County College, is providing the courses at McGuire. “Today, the military is actually engaged with the civilian population where they are stationed. They need philosophy, religion, history to have a greater understanding of where they are.”

[...]

To build what Dr. Henk, an anthropologist, called “cross-cultural competency,” the center has been developing courses and programs intended to help acclimate soldiers to foreign cultures.

[...]

“It started off with language — Farsi, conversational Arabic,” said Robert C. Messina Jr., Burlington’s president, speaking of his meetings with Colonel Martin. “Then he said, ‘Could you get someone to talk about the culture of the Middle East? How you don’t go up and hug someone, and no bikini wearing?’ So we did that.”

Good, so no more U.S. troops wearing bikinis around Baghdad, which I can only imagine was really starting to piss off the locals. But hey, at least they’re learning about “cross-cultural competency.”

Maybe good ol’ Dr. Henk will offer a class on how murdering people, even when you can speak their language or recite their scripture, tends to damage rapport severely.

Cut to the walk home. Christoph asked how much college education costs in America. He said that he’d spoken with some Americans before, and heard that it was even more than the 500€ per semester maximum now legal in Germany. He expressed his disbelief that the cost of education could exceed 1000€ per year. I dropped the bomb that Drexel costs roughly $30,000 per year, depending on scholarships and whatnot. And that most of it I’ve had to borrow.

To which Christoph said, “Oh man, and you have to pay 50% of that back, don’t you?” He said this because when one needs to take out loans to cover student costs in Germany, only 50% of the debt needs to be repaid. The state pays the rest. “No,” I said, “actually one has to pay back the full amount borrowed, plus usually at least 10% interest. Yes, really. No, I’m not joking. It’s really like that. Yeah, I know it’s stupid.”

I explained that in the beginning, when I first got to college, I had to borrow huge amounts of money to study. But since then, because I worked hard and got very good grades, I’ve managed to receive scholarships from the university and elsewhere, and now my education is all but paid for. I said that also the state favors me in financial aid because my family doesn’t earn a ton of money. These things didn’t impress him at all.

Christoph quickly concluded that this system meant only the rich or extremely well educated poor have the opportunity for higher education. I couldn’t really argue with that. He said that these are the last people in society that need education, because they’re already in a fairly sweet position granted them by the decent education they’ve so far received. I certainly couldn’t argue with that. Then he asked why the government doesn’t give out substantially more money to students.

I had to explain that my older sister had, in addition to some academic scholarships, received need-based aid when she first got to college. Several years into it, however, she began to receive fewer federal grants, as the federal student aid budget had been slashed in order to finance the war. This was a sad day indeed.

Now this was a particularly important discussion to me 1) because I was drunk and 2) because I just the other day had a very illuminating conversation with an American here regarding war policy. I had brought up an article I’d read years ago about a German law stating that no soldier is required to carry out orders he finds morally objectionable. (A quick googling yields nothing on this. I’ll try to cite later.) This was quite obviously intended as an anti-Nazi clause, but I’d read about it in the context of the Iraq War.

A member of the German military, notably not an infantry soldier, had been given an assignment which he refused to complete on moral grounds. This military employee was a software programmer who had been assigned to write a piece of defense software. Upon receiving the order, he inquired as to whether the software would be used by American forces in Iraq. When his superior officer could not assure him that it would not be, he refused to write it. I don’t know what ever became of this chap, but when I relayed this anecdote as I’ve done here, an American present said, “Well, that’s a stupid law.” The conversation proceeded thus:

“Why is that stupid?”
“Well if your troops don’t follow orders, then you can’t go to war.”
“Yeah. That’s the point. You don’t go to war.”
“But like what if you have to go to war?”
“What? Nobody has to go to war, dude, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Like what if somebody attacks you or something?”
“What kind of feudal-era ideology are you living under, man? Where have you been for the past few thousand years? War is bullshit and doesn’t need to happen.”

Around this time another American chimed in that I was getting belligerent, and played Solomon by suggesting that while perhaps war is sometimes necessary, Germany isn’t exactly in grave danger in the world right now, and so it’s rather appropriate for them to have this clause. Plus the whole Nazi thing.

So whatever, man. Then I sign on to post this and I see in my feeds a link to a story about how Blackwater mercenaries are pulling guns on U.S. military troops. I didn’t need to read that. The most valuable link I found in my rather cursory reading of the article was to Military Videos, a site which attempts to collect footage of the troops in Iraq for public consumption. I watched one or two and I thought about all that money exploding like so many IEDs, ripping people apart with shrapnel and saturating the streets with gore. When we could be building libraries instead. And the dollar would be so much stronger for it.

Oh, well. The floodwaters are rising, I hear.

It does not get better than that. Well, maybe lolCthulhu. But otherwise not! Thank you, ICHC.com.

Also, my second choice of happy site was WhiteHouse.org. I particularly enjoyed the latest piece, entitled President Addresses Nation on the Way Forward to Surging Back Towards Desperately Spinning the Clusterfuck That is Vietraq. A beautiful excerpt:

Let me stress: I believe we should stay the surge. I believe that our mission gets even more accomplisheder every day. I believe that the war in Iraq will end the way it began – awesomely.

To the Iraqi people: You have voted for freedom, and while the freedom you voted for was freedom to partition your country along sectarian lines, we’re going to focus on the whole “freedom” part, and just be happy that you’re even getting that.

Brutal. But makes me smile!

In the meantime, I wanted to throw out an article in the New York Times about students at Brown University getting hit with filesharing lawsuits by the RIAA. It has two great quotes in it. The first is by a Brown student accused of infringing copyright by filesharing:

“People wonder why college students aren’t rallying more around the Iraq war,” Mr. McCune said. “If there were a draft, we probably would be. Students are so quick to fight for this cause because we’re the ones bearing the burden.”

That’s sociologically pretty important, I should think. It’s a very functional thing: hurt students, piss off students. If you piss off the ones from well-educated, wealthy families, you’re going to have to put up with whatever resistance comes of it. I assume the RIAA was thinking that filing suit against rich kids would lead to faster and higher settlements, improving their bottom line on this whole litigation scare tactic they’ve been running for the past 5 or 10 years. It might not be as simple as that, though, as the next quote illustrates:

Cory Doctorow, co-editor of the popular technology blog Boing Boing, said the recording industry lawsuits were not “scaring students away from file-sharing, but scaring them into political consciousness.” Last year, Mr. Doctorow was an adviser to the Students for Free Culture chapter at the University of Southern California while teaching a course on the history of copyright law.

Read more

This is fact.

I must further point out that this article in itself is rather detrimental to the movement of Free Culture as popularized by Lessig, as have been many posts I’ve made myself. The FreeCulture.org community recently voted to change its tagline to “Students for Free Culture,” and I can’t say that I support this decision. My objections are best summed up by Crosbie Fitch’s post on FreeCulture.org’s listserv last week:

I would have thought “Artists for Free Culture” would have been better.

Or even “Free Citizens for Free Culture”

I would suspect that the popular conception of a student is a passive
receptacles for knowledge, only expected to start doing anything
significantly productive/creative until after they’ve ceased being a
student.

The last thing a passive receptacle needs is the freedom to publish copies
or derivatives. People will assume students are just after broader
educational exemptions for using the library photocopier.

So ‘Students for Free Culture’ comes across as if it was “Couch Potatoes for
Free Culture”.

At worst “Students can’t afford much, so we should get the world’s culture
free of charge. Thanks.”

The best light it can be put in is “Typically militant students having the
luxury of being able to agitate against cultural oppression of the masses”

What’s so special about a student?

Emphasis mine, of course. So was the RIAA wise to pick Brown students for lawsuits, or not? They might get settlements, sure, but will that pay off in the end? I honestly think that pissing off well-educated rich kids–and their families–isn’t the best way to maintain a solid revenue stream, but what do I know about business?

As was widely expected, the laptops never did make it under the $100 mark, even after taking advantage of economies of scale. They’ve skidded in at just under $200, still a bargain (according to me) considering the remarkable amount of hardware packed into the device. And now the OLPC committee has decided that for two short weeks in November 2007, it will make the device publicly available to Americans in a “Give 1, Get 1″ program. This bumps the price up to US$400, but means that the person who buys one of the devices will also be paying to have one sent overseas to a student in a developing country.

David Pogue from the New York Times has reviewed the XO-1, the first iteration of the OLPC laptop. Here’s a video of his time with it.

I want one. I’m definitely considering buying one when my stipend comes. I know it’s a real piece of junk in terms of a laptop, and I know that I’d look like a complete fool if I’m ever seen in public with it. But I really, really want one. Buying one in November would also mean that I’d be foregoing money I should be spending in Europe, for example on traveling.

So I’ve some deliberating yet to do. But I have a yearly gadget allowance for myself, and this fits the bill nicely. Thus far it’s shaping up much better than picking up an iPod Touch, though I might change my mind on that if I ever see Linux and/or Rockbox running on a Touch.

The OLPC is the start of something big, whether a soaring success or an utter failure. Either way, given my interests both personal and professional, I think I want to be on board at least in a small way like grabbing one for myself and one for a student far away.

Plus, I could look at porn on it.

Betty Perry is charged with resisting arrest and failing to maintain her landscaping, both misdemeanors.

She was arrested July 6 after failing to give her name to a police officer who visited her home.

During a struggle, Perry fell and injured her nose. She spent more than an hour in a holding cell before police released her.

“Let’s bring sanity back to law enforcement,” [attorney Gloria Allred] said.

Sounds bad, eh? Well, too bad there’s no sanity on the horizon:

The mayor and City Council apologized, and the police department said the situation could have been handled differently. But the city attorney still is pressing charges, and Perry is due back in court next month.

A state investigation found that Officer James Flygare acted properly in arresting Perry after trying to get her to cooperate.

Read the full story

Ouch. OK, let’s try another! Today I found a wonderful tale of police impropriety (don’t worry, the headline was nearly so euphemistic): Wheelchair-Bound Woman Dies After Being Shocked With Taser 10 Times. Not from the Onion. I swear.

Family attorney Rick Alexander said Delafield’s death could have been prevented and that there are four things that jump out at him about the case.”One, she’s in a wheelchair. Two, she’s schizophrenic. Three, they’re using a Taser on a person that’s in a wheelchair, and then four is that they tasered her 10 times for a period of like two minutes,” Alexander said.

Read the full story

Normally I like to rip on lawyers, but these guys have it pretty much together. Except Rick can’t really count, as the article said the police reported stated it was actually more like three minutes of tasing. God that would suck so hard. Although I guess if you’re schizophrenic, it might be a blast, I don’t know. Was that insensitive?

One last fun article: Cops: Man dies after armless artist’s headbutt.

Police are investigating the death of a man who collapsed after he was head-butted by an armless man in a fight over a woman. [...] Known by the nickname “Rusty,” Redfern made a name for himself in the late 1980s for pen and ink drawings he does using his foot.

Read the full story

As if I didn’t already know not to fuck with people named “Rusty.”

Sorry for all the links, blockquotes, and linebreaks. I’ll follow this up with another post about the Eisbach in a bit.

Badge-bearer wants to see my ID, and I resist, and he says, “No, I’m a cop, you have to show me your ID.” So I take out my passport, he flips it open to the picture page with me still holding onto it, then tries to take it from me. Again I resist, as there’s no way I’m about to be ripped off by a bunch of kids pretending they’re cops. But on the bench beside me there had been a German kid sitting, roughly my age, maybe a year older, and he’s going along with this, letting them frisk him. So I grumble and finally say, “When in Rome….”

The guy the hands my passport to his buddy, silences my protest, then asks whether I have any illegal items on my person or in my bag such as drugs or weapons. I say that I do not. He asks me to take my hand out of my pocket, and he doesn’t ask nicely. I comply. He then begins to remove all items from one of my pockets, inspect them, replace them, then move onto the next pocket. In my hoodie pockets I had my keychain and the other set of room keys. (I had been keeping them in my hoodie pocket, one for each hand, so I wouldn’t lose them.) In my front right pocket, I had a pen and a receipt from the internet cafe: 1,30€; Logincode: 35C1EFC5. In my front left pocket, I had my digital camera.

My back right pocket yielded my wallet, which was of much interest to this chap. I didn’t want to take my eyes off of him, especially with my very limited funds potentially in grave danger in his hands, but I wanted to maintain visual contact with my passport in the hands of his partner, who, I saw, was now repeating, “Herr Schäfer” and then spelling out my passport number into his walkie talkie. Maybe this was all a front to get my passport information to sell on the black market, but I couldn’t figure out what good that would do anyone. Then again, I’m an idiot.

So the guy who showed me the badge is inspecting my wallet, flipping through business cards–he saw one that he found compelling enough to sniff–poking here and there. Didn’t even count the money I had in it, though. It was returned to me intact. They had just finished with the guy who had been sitting next to me on the bench, and wished him a good day. They hand me back my passport, say „Schönen Tag,” and disappear.

I turned to my bench friend and began to interrogate him. Here’s how the conversation went:

Me: What the hell was that? Did that really just happen?
Him: Sure. Why not?
Me: Dude, were they really police officers? I’m form the USA, and that is totally freaking illegal there. You could never do that. Ever.”
Him: Yep, it is. I mean, Munich’s a big city, so they’re allowed to kontrollieren anyone they see fit, in order to keep drugs and weapons off the streets.
Me: But… really?
Him: Yeah. So where are you from?
Me: The USA.
Him: Yeah, but where are you really from?
Me: Um… oh, sorry! Philadelphia.
Him: No, I mean your German. Where here?
Me: Oh, I’ve studied it for a long time. Yeah. I’m American.
Him: OK.

Yes, I included that last part because it gave me a much needed ego boost. I must say, though, that if one’s German is truly good, it doesn’t warrant compliment. I’ve noticed that, even if someone has an accent, if their German is impeccable, the respectful thing to do is not to mention it. But enough modesty.

This guy seems to say it’s cool. I’ve shot my Berlin buddy Cihan (from ESLP) an e-mail relating this story, and hopefully he’ll not say, “Dude!! You got ripped off! That’s totally illegal in Germany!” He’s studying law, so I trust him to know what’s up. Comment for me, buddy!

I wish I had thought to ask what would have happened if I hadn’t had my passport on me.

That is all for this tale.