Skistone Cops

Last week we went skiing more or less every day. It was half term for the kids, so each day I drove them up the mountain to our local resort Hargitafürdő / Baile Harghita, and Bogi had an hour long lesson while Paula got pulled around on skis by me, and then went down shallow slopes on her own. Except on Saturday when she went down a much faster slope and I had to grab her and lift her off her feet before she careered into a tree. After that she didn't want to go again.

Anyway, things at Hargita have improved a lot over the last few years. There are far more places to stay, cafes, and there is even a new small ski lift for kids and a tubing place (where people sledge down the hill on an inner tube and then get pulled up by some kind of special lift). The other thing that has changed is the demographics - when I first went up there 5 years ago, one only ever really heard Hungarian spoken, but slowly over the years it's become far more of a Romanian resort, to the point now where you barely hear any Hungarian, and the majority of the cars are from Bacau or Neamt or places. Having said that though, it was pretty quiet last week seeing as it was a school holiday nation-wide, and it's a very good winter for skiing. I guess that's a visible indicator of the crisis.

Saw two new kinds of police up there too, to add to my collection of various different Romanian police forces, of which there appear to be a huge number. This time I encountered Mountain Gendarmes (Jandarmeria montana) (not sure what they do exactly, but since I've never been really sure what the normal lowland gendarmes in Romania do, this is par for the course). There were also a bunch of blokes in a thick brown uniform skiing around, who were part of the Brigada Antiterorista. Which of course raised the question in my mind as to what the hell they were doing there. Were they on a work outing, and if so, did they really need to wear the uniform? Were they there to counter some specific threat that had been made to the small Csipike ski run? (live webcam here) Which as you can see is not exactly the kind of place that you'd think would be high up the Al Qaida hitlist (they were there all week too, before Romania had announced it was going to spend money it doesn't have installing some bizarre American missile defence shield. Not sure why the US can't pay for all of this, but there you go. Perhaps it's part of the oddly lopsided and with no corruption at all no sir Bechtel deal) . Or, were they there to reassure Romanian skiers that they were being protected from some previously unknown violent Hungarian secessionist movement?

(In the course of checking some spellings for this bit, I have discovered that there is a "Special Intervention Brigade" within the Jandarmeria who go by the name "Vlad Ţepeş" (Vlad the Impaler). I swear I'm not making that up. Look.)

This week there will be a big event up there. The world cup in ski orienteering (round 3) is being held here. (You can find it here and here), and this is apparently the biggest winter sport event held in Romania for many decades. Personally I'd never even hear of ski orienteering (though now I have, it does sound like an event that makes perfect sense), and we've had short course speed skating championships and Junior Ice Hockey world championships here since I've lived here, so that does sound quite a claim.

Just to finish off the winter stuff, we had another big snowfall this weekend, but everybody seems to be managing. Unlike in Bucharest where the city is apparently paralysed, schools closed and all sorts. Soft southern jessies.

i-dolatry

Today half the internet is in a state of wild-eyed, priapic excitement over the latest whatever-it-will-be that Steve Jobs reveals today. Geeks all over the world have been metaphorically shaving their legs and sliding on their sexiest underwear in preparation for this moment. (I may have done some slight gender mixing in my sexual metaphors there, but I'm sure you'll cope)

I on the other hand, am less breathless and and doe-eyed. Not because I don't suspect that the i-whatever will be something pretty cool, but because I have become steadily more and more bitter and twisted by the unquestioning drooling and fundamentalism that spreads amongst the population whenever Steve Jobs speaks.

Firstly, lets get over the stuff that Apple does well. They produce cool new products that tend to be ahead of the field. They are also seemingly the first tech company that recognised the value of design and style, and that you can actually spend money on making things look really good as well as just functioning well.

What they really do best though is marketing. Not just producing stuff but convincing many, often thoughtful, people that to own an i-thingy is cool and somehow sticking-it-to-the-nasty-microsoft/PC-man.

But, it's a massive and incredibly rich multinational corporation. You're not supporting some struggling hand-to-mouth co-operative when you buy an Apple. They sell more computers than anyone else. I'm sure they also sell more MP3 players than anyone else, and increasingly are taking a huge slice out of the mobile phone market. It's as if Pepsi had managed to convince everyone that to buy Pepsi and not Coke was some kind of independent-minded, deeply liberal thing to do.

Apple consumers (and you are a consumer, not a style guru), will go around telling everyone how amazing their ipod/macbook/iphone/whatever is this week's gimmick is. You don't get that from other people. You don't hear people who use Windows raving about how amazing their OS is, or people who have a Dell or an Acer or something go on about their computer, but Apple users never bloody shut up about it. Is this because the current Mac OS is better than the current MS OS? No. There have been some very very shit versions of Windows and there have been some equally shit versions of Mac OS. An OS is a like a language - you feel slightly more comfortable using the one that you first used, but you can learn to use another if you chooose and one is not inherently better than the other. In the main, Mac OS does some things better than Windows and Windows does some things better than Mac OS. Big deal. Some people prefer Coke to Pepsi, others prefer Pepsi to Coke. Get over it. You have a computer. It's a product just like any other. And, I might venture to add, an expensive one at that. For whatever reason pretty much everything made by Apple costs significantly more than it's non-Apple equivalent. Given that they have a willing army of evangelists ready and willing to openly masturbate (metaphorically) over their products, they don't even really need to spend anything on advertising so they ought to be cheaper, but no.

I have to hand it to Apple, honestly. They do make good stuff, but this marketing trick is absolutely amazing. I half-expect people to start showing up at the door offering copies of Watchtower and telling me how Apple changed their life, and how Steve Jobs is their personal lord and saviour.

But when I see people I respect and like who've obviously been suckered into the role of willing tool in extending the reach of a massive multinational corporation it makes me sad and makes me want to slap them (gently - I like these people, remember) until they snap out of it.

Apparently one of the possible names for today's big unveiling is the i-con. Seems really appropriate.

Poster boy

A bit of a follow-up to last week's rant about Cameron and co.



You too, can have fun with modifying the wild-eyed, slapheaded, "look at me I'm not wearing a tie, I'm that cool" Dave Cameron poster here.

Bloody cold today, of the "hairs on inside of ones nose freeze up within 3 seconds of stepping outside" variety. If you're not familiar with the hairinnose scale of temeperature it's about -28 at the moment, and it's nearly noon when I type this.

Whatever happened to the BBC?

These days, thanks to the miracles of modern technology and that, we can get two BBC channels on our TV all the way out here in li'l ol' Csikszereda. (The same technology means we can no longer get the very local channels like Csiki TV and Szekely TV, which is kind of weird, really, but I guess that's globalisation for you)

Anyway, these channels are BBC World (which is the news channel) and BBC Prime, which has recently been rebranded as BBC Entertainment. I'm assuming that the rebranding came because lots of people were asking "is this really your prime output?". It may well of course be, and that all the BBC actually shows these days are interminable shows about antiques, "The Weakest Link", and seemingly thousands of soap operas with "Holby" in the title. Every now and again I flick over to see, but it's always some awful rubbish. The only time it gets watched is in the early morning when Paula watches the kids shows on it. These are actually quite good (at least compared with the alternatives she has available), though all of them seemingly ask her to guess something (which window to look through in Tikkabilla*, which coloured house someone will visit in Balamory, which teletubby will get the TV beamed through their stomach, etc), which is something she's not yet comfortable with. Perhaps it's something that you get along with breast feeding in the UK, but here I try to chivvy her along "Which window do you think it will be?" but she's having none of it "I don't know". "No, I know you don't know, but guess". "I can't know". "No, I know, just guess", by which time the camera has already zoomed in on the square window so she then says "The square one".

(*Tikkabilla, by the way, is clearly just the children's programme formerly known as Play School, but rebranded to be more hip for today's web 2.0 generation. New name, dolls and teddies replaced by small purple dragon, etc etc.)

But, anyway, I digress.

So, BBC News, has really gone downhill, and is depressing me. This is the channel that the hard right calls "leftist", but is in fact, as far as I can tell these days very much rightist. Some examples:

1. Yesterday, they invited someone from the Wall Street Journal to comment on the Massachusetts election (and provided no information that the WSJ has over the past few years turned into a hard right wing rag of the lowest order, nor any balancing viewpoints). This guy proceeded to say that the reason Obama was losing popularity was because he wasn't reaching across to the other side, which as far as I can tell is patently false, and if anything his problem is that he's spending too much time trying to appease Republicans. He's not reaching out to the mad Limbaugh/Beck/Palin extreme end of the Republican party, well, because they're all barking mad, and how the hell would you reach out to them? Promise to bomb Iran and jail people for using birth control if they agreed to say not such nasty things about you?

2. Just before Christmas the woman who does the business section on the morning slot was discussing the possibility of a strike by British Airways cabin crew. "It's really important that BA win this" she said (and that's a word for word quote, since it stunned me so much that I can still hear her saying it). Firstly "BA" does not equate to "BA Management" as she implied, and also what kind of reporting is it to say out front that the workers needed to be defeated? I know she's the business correspondent, but still. How left wing is all of that?

3. Today's top story was that the Chinese economy was moving ahead of Japan's. Haiti was barely even mentioned. I know it was a week ago, but it's still a huge story and one that is a bit more important than China moving up to second place in some kind of imaginary world economic league table. Euronews, by the way, has been fantastic on Haiti. Really good reporting, important information (journalists have been banned from the airport now, by the way, which is not something I've heard on the BBC), and great testimonies from people there (Haitians and relief workers).

4. They are really pissing me off with their pro-occupation stance whenever the issue of Israel - Palestine comes up. I mean compared to any US media outlet they come across as balanced, but they're really not. (And in fact an independent report a year or two back, confirmed this feeling of mine that they are more favourable to the Israeli government position than anything else)

So, what happened to the BBC? And what will become of it under the next government? It's all very depressing.

Romania in the grip of violet flame conspiracy

Just to balance the last post I made, at least in the sense of showing that the British system isn't the only one that is built on a steaming pile of bullshit, Romania is currently going through bizarre political fights over some kind of hocus-pocus "energy attacks" and rings of purple fire and witchcraft and tons of other weird new-age claims and counter claims

There's a news article here and the story is covered in much more amusing depth by Craig over at Bucharest Life - yesterday and today. It's all very amusing/ludicrous/slightly terrifying that these people represent the political elite in this country.

The Last Big Lie of Thatcherism

It's probably apparent where I stand on Thatcherism to anyone who's read much of anything on this blog, so I'll not go into it in any great depth - I'm not a fan, basically. [This shouldn't of course be read to imply that I think Britain had it worse in the 1980s than Romania, for example - obviously we didn't, and compared to Ceausescu, Thatcher and her odious cabinet of scum, were not even in the same league. Nor should it be read to imply that I somehow think that war-criminal Tony Blair was somehow a beacon of positive change. He, after all, is a Thatcherist himself]

However, when one argues about Thatcherism with people who do think that it was all a good thing, there are a number of things which get raised as examples of what she did that was positive. One of the main ones of these was that she (and her team - it's not really all about her specifically) ushered in neo-liberal economic policies, which I personally never saw as "a good thing", but which now has been shown up to be a house of cards that has collapsed in spectacular fashion. That's one aspect of Thatcherism that has, at least, been shown up for its disastrous consequences rather than its supposed benefits (you'll note that, Nicolas Sarkozy, for example, who came to power preaching a Thatcherite economic revolution for France, has been very quiet on this issue since Lehman Brothers went down).

The second argument is that she crushed the unions and stripped them of their power. This required the idea of unions themselves to be demonised, which was accomplished (with the aid of a compliant media) very successfully. However, unions are (and always have been) a vehicle for organised labour, and the concept of the powerless joining together to give themselves a voice seems, to me, to be something that should be celebrated rather than demonised. Do unions have problems? yes. Are unions and the idea behind them problematic in themselves? No. So, yes, Thatcherism disempowered the already powerless. Difficult to see how this was a benefit to anyone, honestly - even "management", for whom organised labour ought to be a partner and something vaulable and helpful rather than an obstacle.

The third and last big lie of Thatcherism was that it ushered in a newly meritocratic Britain. A class-free Britain in which people could rise to success regardless of their position in society. This has been the one enduring "success story" of the Thatcherite ideology.

But look at Britain's next government:

Here they are in all their classless glory. Here we can see David "Dave" Cameron, George "real name something like Tarquin" Osborne, and other members of the shadow cabinet that will almost certainly be elected to lead Britain later this year. In the front row you can also see the cartoonishly bumbling upper-class-twit-of-the-year, and current Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. Essentially a bunch of people educated at Britain's most expensive public schools and subsequently Oxford. And now we have a meritocracy? I hardly think so. [It should also be pointed out here that Blair also went to some massively expensive and exclusive private school, so this argument was blown out of the water some time ago, but because he was - in theory- a Labour politician, this was overlooked]

And now, "Dave" has come out with his latest statement (on teachers) revealing his understanding of the world and how things work. To summarise, teachers need to have gained high degrees from a "good university" (whatever that is, in Cameron speak). Teacher training in Dave's world is unimportant, and no-one who gets a lower degree or one from a not-so-good university ought to to be allowed in the classroom. Now I do have a professional opinion on this (as a teacher and a teacher trainer), which is that it's absolute fucking garbage, but putting that to one side, lets see what it reveals about this meritocratic society that we've apparently been living in since those heady days of the 80s.

The only people who talk like this, for a start, are those for whom the concept of meritocracy is sort of a nice thing to keep the plebs happy. I remember once overhearing one of my few incredibly snobbish private-school-and-oxbridge-educated acquaintances tell someone that a mutual friend had "a random degree from some mickey mouse university" (that's an exact quote, as despite the fact that this was over 20 years ago, it really stuck with me). That's how these people talk. Anyone not in their exalted coterie, is basically non-existent, and of no real value whatsoever. By revealing his (a) complete lack of understanding of how teaching actually works - and what works in teaching; and (b) "good university" biases, Dave also reveals that despite the attempts to portray himself as a man of the people, he is locked into his own little world characterised by that photo up there.

Does all this mean that he will be a bad Prime Minister? No, though he obviously needs an education adviser very badly. Does his background exclude him from government? No. Does he have any idea how normal people live, what their concerns are, how things could be improved for them? I very much think not.

One could even argue (not that I would, but one could) that he would be a good prime minister, based on the fact that he's been told from an early age that he ought to be in charge of things, and has been prepared for this throughout his education. And that we, those who didn't have his highly privileged background, have been subtly told all our lives that there are a class of people who are better than us and ought to be in charge. But please, let's forget all this shit about meritocracy. The last big lie of Thatcherism is just that - a complete and utter lie.

Finally, to sign off this angry rant, especially for Dave, who probably thinks this is a good song, though he's also probably never really understood it, is something for him to tap his feet to:


You'll never live like common people,
you'll never do what common people do,
you'll never fail like common people,
you'll never watch your life slide out of view

Where is Kauf anyway?

Csik/Ciuc has a new large, ultra-modern supermarket (in case the title doesn't tell you, it's Kaufland). It's dead fancy, but no doubt many of the more interesting things that are available will soon disappear when the owners realise that nobody in Csikszereda has a clue what they are and therefore won't buy them. Already the fresh basil that was available for the first week or so has vanished, which is a great shame, and I fear for the continued availability of fennel. (I have discovered through the sudden availability of this exotic vegetable that it has a Hungarian name, which is édeskömény (or "sweet cumin" in my direct translation)

It's an odd experience finding oneself in such a place here in this dusty and isolated one-horse town. Before Christmas I was in there and they were blasting out Slade's Merry Christmas Everybody over the speakers, which was a real moment of familiarity/fear that one day the EU will reduce everywhere to some carbon copy of the UK.

Anyway, I recently heard a (possibly libellous, so I'm not repeating it on here) very disturbing story about how Kaufland obtained planning permission for this particular branch, so I'm hanging back from returning.

Christmas is over...

...which I suppose means I better make an effort to do some more blogging. I'll try and get back on it this week.

More media coverage of 1989

Obviously I could just list a bunch of articles here, but I've tried to handpick the most interesting ones

The BBC: "Eljen Laszlo Tokes - Szabadsag"
Radio Free Europe: "Ceausescu was sitting and I was looking at his testicles"
The Times: "The situation has worsened so much that many people have in their minds, in my view, a mistaken nostalgia for the Communist era"
BBC (video): "85 of the 100 richest people in Romania today are former top communists"
(That last one will soon be superseded by a much longer podcast in which John Simpson - a bit of a hero of mine - looks back to 1989 here and then to today, which will very soon appear here. I'm keeping my eye open)

And nothing to do with the 1989, but fascinating all the same, an article from Life magazine dated Jan 9, 1939. Interesting on many levels (not least for the dodgy politically incorrect style of writing). I particularly liked the picture of the "vice girl" in a headscarf, swimming costume and slippers, and the Romanian army oxen walking through Bucharest.

Climate, weather, and revolutions

Happy Anniversary
Today is December 16th, which means it's the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the revolution here, which began on this day, 1989 in Timisoara, before spreading to Bucharest and elsewhere. This is inevitably being covered by real journalists and media outlets, so I probably don't really need to go into it (and anyway, I wasn't here). Here are some of those news pieces:

• The best one (IMO) in the Financial Times
  
• The Irish Times
• Something called International Security Watch (no idea who they are)

I'm sure there will be more to come between today and December 25th, when Ceausescu was executed, ending the revolution (in the same sense of "end" as the war on Iraq "ended" when Bush appeared with a banner saying "Mission Accomplished" or when they pulled that statue down)

Hó Hó Hó
It's been snowing here for getting on for 36 hours now. It started sometime on Monday night (not really sure when, because you know I was all like asleep and that) and it's still going. It's not as deep as you might imagine after such an extended period, because it's not that kind of snow. I'm sure the Eskimos have a word for it, but in the less snow-based language of English I refer to it as that-light-powdery-snow-which-is-oddly-dry-given-that-it's-made-out-of-water-and-is-quite-difficult-to-make-into-snowballs-because-you-really-need-to-apply-a-huge-amount-of-pressure-to-it-to-compress-it-enough-to-stay-together-meaning-really-only-adults-or-older-teenagers-can-make-snowballs-from-it-which-exacerbates-the-already-slightly-unfair-military-strength-advantage-of-the-father-in-a-snowball-battle.

No hope
We're all going to die. Well, you knew that already I presume (if not, sorry to break it to you), but what I mean here is that as a species we might not be long for this world as we increasingly quickly destroy it. It seems likely that in the current talks in Copenhagen, virtually nothing is going to get done, with the developed world refusing to offer much help to the less developed bit (which is a little unfair, to say the least, as the less developed bit is the bit which is going to suffer the most from climate change, with some of it disappearing entirely, and it is also the bit which has contributed least to the problem), and the USA and China being particularly obstreperous in some kind of "we're determined to be the richest country when the world ends" fight-to-the-death.

Now in the grand scheme of things the amount of money that is being asked for to help out here is basically nothing. Currently on the table is an offer of $10bn a year, and there is debate over whether to try somehow to increase that to $100bn (which is very clearly the maximum it's ever going to be). Many rich countries are balking at this, and obviously it does sound like a lot of money. But let's compare it with the amount of money that has so far been thrown at or promised to the banking and financial services sector to bail them out in the wake of the credit crisis. Want to have a guess at how much that might be? Well, I'll tell you. You might need to sit down (you probably are already, but who knows in these days of iphones and the like). Oxfam estimates this figure to be...$8,424bn. Or, if you like, 84 times the absolute maximum that anyone is expecting to be promised at the current summit, and 840 times the amount that has been currently offered. As it stands the argument is whether they can come up with $40bn. 200 times less that what the banks got. (OK, the banks thing is supposed to be a one off and these are annual sums, but I think we're still looking at a massive disparity here).

So, as the sea levels rise, and the crops fail, and farmland turns to desert, and there is a massive global refugee crisis, and traumatic economic, physical, cultural, and environmental changes, at least you'll be able to go and make a deposit and know that the head of the bank will get a vast Christmas bonus. it's a comforting thought, isn't it? Isn't it?