But let’s get back to Bolivia. There are a lot of places you don’t want to get busted for drug smuggling. The worst is probably Singapore, where the award is execution, but I’m guessing Bolivia isn’t a walk in the park either. That was probably what one of the three girls thought as well, and when she was released on a NOK 200 000 (~USD 35 000) bail in December 2009, she decided to get the hell out of the country and back to Norway. Here she was charged for attempting to smuggle the cocaine to Norway, but just recently she got acquitted by a Norwegian court.

The two girls still stuck in Cochabamba were not that lucky: In April 2010 they were both sentenced to 13 years and four months in jail for their failed smuggling attempt. The sentence was later reduced to 10 years and eight months for both of them. But one of the girls, Stina Brendemo Hagen, decided that she didn’t want to spend her twenties in a Bolivian jail, and when she was released on bail in August 2011, she fled the country and flew back to Norway.

And here she is free to live a perfectly normal life because the Norwegian authorities won’t prosecute her as she “can’t be sentenced for the same charges twice”. It doesn’t even look like she has to serve her ten years of jail time in a Norwegian jail either, so basically she’s off the hook (source, source, both in Norwegian). My three word comment: What the fuck!?

Norway, like every other country in the world, doesn’t extradite its own citizens to other countries. This is understandable, because in other countries they might, in a worst case scenario, face a death sentence. I can also see that it would be wrong to sentence someone for the same charges twice. But as a matter of fact she has been through a trial where she was indeed found guilty and sentenced in Bolivia. That she does not have serve in Norway makes no sense to me. Does this mean that if I go to Bolivia, put a bullet in someone’s head, get arrested, sentenced to life in prison, but break out and flee to Norway, I can walk around as a free man back home? Is getting back to Norway a magical get-out-of-jail-card?

We fine middle aged politicians NOK 25 000 (~USD 4 400) for getting a full body massage by a prostitute in Latvia (source), but trying to smuggle a load of cocaine is evidentially just fine. That’s pretty fucked up right there. Does someone with a little knowledge of how the Norwegian legal system works please weigh in?

I tried the service the other day and this is the result:

It looks like my views on the environment and other related hippie-business influence my choice of political party this time around. The result has changed quite a bit since the 2009 parliamentary elections:

It might be that the political parties have changed their views, what do I know. It’s good to see that FrP (Progress Party) is still tucked in safely at the bottom, even far behind Pensjonistpartiet (Pensioners’ Party). I have to admit; that fact came as a bit of a shocker.

Even more shocking is probably that I agree more with the views of Kristent Samlingsparti (Christian Unity Party) than the views of well-established parties. I thought I had nothing in common with the Christian Unity Party at all, but now it seems I have to want think it’s really cool to build huge walls in the Middle East. I don’t, just for the record. Also, the party I was most likely to vote for in the parliamentary elections back in 2009, are way back down in the second half of the lest this year.

Interesting. So interesting, I’m tempted to call shenanigans on the entire Valgomat service. Did you get surprised yourself?

1) I’m sorry, but George Carlin got this on wrong (reference).

But there is one thing I think we should consider. We Norwegians have been excellent at padding ourselves on our backs for not calling for revenge, increased security and control, but rather a more open, a more united society. Prime minister Jens Stoltenberg talked about “even more democracy”, whatever that means. But what if all this had not been the work of a single madman? What if he was part of an organization whose members are hard to identify, but easily associated with people you see every day? What if it had been a member of al-Qaeda who parked a Volkswagen Crafter in the government quarter and dressed up like a police officer to gain the trust of the people at Utøya? What would then have been the Norwegian reaction?

And with that question lingering we will now return to our normal programming of occasional incoherent rambling.

If you are a running around doing this you need to get your act together. I’d love to see you arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to community service; your first job being to remove whatever piece of crap (pun intended) you were caught making. You might say that I’m overreacting. I say you should read up on the broken windows theory and shut the fuck up. The kind of graffiti Oslo is drowning in makes no sense at all. Today I even saw a wall where someone had written #antisec, which made me want to reach out for the first nerdy looking “hacker” activist I saw and punch him in the face. That’s the broken windows theory in practice.

But every now and then a piece of art surfaces that doesn’t just look like a random act of vandalism. It blends into the urban environment where it’s been created while at the same time livening up what is normally a gray and boring area. Some time over the last couple of weeks, two artists have created some excellent pieces down by the walkway opposite the bus terminal in Schweigaards gate. They’ve even covered some of the crap that was already on the walls. Here are a few quick captures I did while walking by today.

Yeah, I know I’m being quite the hypocrite here; smashing common graffiti while at the same time praising the works of art pictured above. But I’m going to go ahead and let this one slide and just be a hypocrite. Digging around on the interwebs a little, I discovered that artists are Alice Pasquini and C215. It looks like they tend to roam around a lot. Check out Street Art London for pictures of work they’ve done in London. Also, have a look at C215′s Flickr photo stream for more pieces he’s done in Oslo this summer.

Norway. About 5 million people. Way too many online newspapers. Verdens Gang (VG) is one that I rarely visit because it’s basically just a compilation of annoyances. I know I’m stepping on a lot of sore toes now, but that’s my humble opinion. In spite of my opinion, however, it’s the most popular domestic site, according to Alexa. Boy, is my thumb not on the pulse of Norway.¹⁾! Every now and then, though, I take my chances and head into the journalistic void that is VG in the hope that something might have changes since my last visit.

Unfortunately, it rarely does. When I went to the site just now I was greeted with an article with the heading “Ordered jacket — got poop“, while their main story is that it’s more environmentally friendly to own an SUV than a German Shepherd. For some reason they have used a picture of a Belgian Tervuren to illustrate this point. And let’s not get started on the design of the site itself and the comments people post on the articles. Well, to be honest, the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory can be studied in detail on every single site on the internet that allows anonymous commenting, not just VG.

Anyway. I wasn’t going to ramble on about the fall of journalism or crappy web design, but rather an article I read on VG a few days ago when I ventured so innocently to the site.

The article was about a politician who gave the middle finger and a huge “fuck you” to the environmental movement and the science that says global warming is caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases, which result from human activities such as the burning of fossil fuel and deforestation. To the picture of her tanking her 2003 Ford Expedition, politician Sylvi Listhaug laughs at what she calls “climate hysteria”. Sylvi is representing the Progress Party, which is currently in opposition.

In her opinion, which is partly the opinion of the Progress Party, there are no scientific proof that CO2 emissions are a contributing cause to global warming. It’s just “an excuse to introduce more taxes and fees”. When asked about her car and its fuel efficiency she responds that “the car is perfectly legal in the United States, where they also have environmental laws” and that more people should have a car like hers out of safety concerns: “Norwegian families are driving around in death traps because they can’t afford safe cars” (with reference to the tax levels on large cars, SUVs are taxed quite heavily).

A lot of sane arguments right there. Let’s pick them apart, one by one, shall we?

Fist and foremost, let’s talk about the taxes and fees you as a someone who live in Norway has to pay. Yes, we are pretty fucked when it comes to taxes and fees. And yes, some people leech off the system and should be punished medieval-style for that. But the bulk of us get a lot back from all the taxes we pay. Sylvi herself are getting a lot back right now as she’s in parental leave. Because of the taxes Sylvi and her fellow citizens have paid, she can stay home with her kid for a massive 46 weeks and still get 100% of the money she would have received from her employer. Or, if she prefers to stay home for 56 weeks – that’s more than a year – she’ll get 80% of her salary.

On to her 2003 Ford Explorer. With combined fuel efficiency of 14 MPG (source), this baby burns through juice like there is no tomorrow. Even though her car was perfectly legal when it was manufactured back in 2003, things are looking very different today. New SUVs that are sold in the US today need a minimum average of 24.1 MPG (source) – so it actually seems like the Americans care about fuel consumption as well, Sylvia. What gives!?

When it comes to her statement that there is no scientific proof that CO2 emissions are a contributing cause to global warming, this is an ongoing discussion among scientists and lobbyists around the world. But instead of bickering, let’s take a quick look at two graphs:

(source, source)

Both are fairly self explanatory, but let’s quickly have a look at them. The first graph shows the global mean land-ocean temperature change from 1880-2010, relative to the 1951-1980 mean. The black line is the annual mean and the red line is the 5-year running mean. The green bars show uncertainty estimates. The second graph is known as the “Keeling Curve” and it shows the long-term increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations from 1958-2008. Monthly CO2 measurements display seasonal oscillations in an upward trend; each year’s maximum occurs during the Northern Hemisphere’s late spring, and declines during its growing season as plants remove some atmospheric CO2. I don’t know about you, but to me it seems like there is some kind of correlation here.

But before we go, let’s, for the sake of the argument, say that the CO2 emissions does not cause global warming. In fact, global warming is just a conspiracy to sell more air conditioners. Still fossil fuels are, in all practical terms, a limited resource that we will one day run out of. If we don’t find a viable energy substitute before that happens, our civilization as we know it will implode on itself in the fight for the last drop of oil. That should be good enough reason to keep the current use as low as possible and to stay away from 2003 Ford Expeditions with under half the fuel efficiency of a modern family sedan.

I don’t want people like this run my country. That’s why I vote.

VG article: “Ler av klimahysteri“.

¹⁾ Did I do that right? I’m not sure, but either way I managed to cram a Bill Hicks quote in there.

Of course I’m talking about Wikileaks’ found and editor in chief Julian Paul Assange. Very few people know exactly where he is hiding these days, and that’s probably a good thing.

Right now, Wikileaks is slowly releasing 251,287 secret US embassy cables. With only 926 of them out in the wild so far, they’ve got a long way to go. Today’s most interesting document was the 2008 Critical Foreign Dependencies Initiative (CFDI) list, a list of locations around the world that are of key value to the US. On the list are assets like mines, undersea cable landing sites and oil processing plants.

So Wikileaks has this list and they publish it on the internet. And I ask myself: “Why?”

Some of the information Wikileaks has published is important, like the “Collateral Murder” video. But the CFDI list is of absolutely no interest to anyone – except for the people who probably shouldn’t have access to that kind of information.

There might be something interesting among the two hundred and fifty thousand cables Wikileaks will publish in the coming weeks and months. But so far the information in the cables has mostly been gossip and chatter. To me it looks like they are simply publishing these documents because they can, not because it’s important that the public gets to see it.

¹⁾ Which means he’s safe for the next decade, at least. Yeah, I know it’s an old joke by now, but it’s still good

According to the same source, Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas by most economic measures. It had a nominal GDP of 7.018 billion USD in 2009 with a GDP per capita of 790 USD, about $2 per person per day. Needless to say, the country’s infrastructure was in no way capable of handling a natural disaster like the one we’re seeing now even before the earthquake hit, and most of us can only imagine what it’s like now. So, please, if you can spare a few dollars – or whatever currency you might use – donate to your favorite humanitarian organization.

That concludes today’s morale encouragement. Now let’s put everything into perspective.

In the time it took you to read the above three paragraphs, 9 children died of starvation somewhere in the world. In the next hour, on average around 700 more will die. In the next day, 16,000. In 2010: 6,000,000¹⁾. It’s possible that the CNNs and BBC Worlds you are watching are also running 24/7 coverage of that catastrophe, but I doubt it. Don’t get me wrong, what happened in Haiti is a disaster of biblical proportions, and we should all help in whatever way we find possible, but why do we keep forgetting about the disasters that happening all the time? It’s just that: They are happening all the time.

If Haiti had been struck by earthquakes three times a week, most of us wouldn’t give a rat’s ass. We’d all forget about it quickly, because in a short while it would no longer have the shock factor it once had and the continuing earthquakes would no longer be news worthy. Take suicide bombings in Iraq, for instance. Remember when they first started to occur back in 2003 when the United States military invaded the country? You probably don’t remember the details, but maybe you remember the enormous media coverage they got. Today? There might be a small note somewhere towards the back of the newspaper, and if you’re lucky, you might notice it.

Yes, I’m exaggerating, but that’s what you have to do to make a point these day.

Most people don’t care much about the tragedies we don’t hear about in the news. Or, it’s not that we don’t care, it’s that we don’t remember – or even know. And I’m no better; I had no idea the starvation figures were that bad. But now that I know, maybe it’s time not just to look at isolated catastrophes like the Haitian earthquake, but to consider what’s happening every second of every day all year? Maybe it’s time to finally start that monthly donation?

1) Wikipedia – Starvation.

Anyway.

I’m not sure how it is in other countries, but in Norway it’s possible to avoid getting your mailbox stuffed with advertising, leaflets and whatnot simply by attaching a sticker to your mailbox or front door saying that you don’t want it. The sticker doesn’t even have to be a pre-made one, you can just create your own. And from the 1^st of June this year, it was possible do the same to avoid getting free newspapers as well. When I came home from work today, I’d received one district newspaper, one city newspaper and one that was strictly not a newspaper, but an advertisement newspaper from a real estate broker.

I don’t read any of them. If I’m interested in district or city news, there are great sites on the internet that give me just that and when I eventually decide that I need a bigger apartment, I can collect information I need to achieve on the fantastic interweb, too. So today I’m taking action, I’m attaching a sticker to both my mailbox and front door.

If you don’t read any of the free newspapers you get in your mail either, you should do the same. Below are two versions of such a sticker, one that I grabbed from the site Grønn Hverdag and a version I made without the Grønn Hverdag URL in case you for some reason don’t want to advertise for the site. For kicks, I’ve also included the same two versions of a sticker that should stop the flow of advertising you really don’t need if you haven’t done that already. Right click the images you want to save and select “Save image…” or whatever your favorite browser might call saving an image to your computer. Then print, attach with scotch tape and live happily ever after.

(click to enlarge)

North Korea is in a unusually bad mood because of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1874. The resolution imposes further economic and commercial sanctions on the country. As if we didn’t give them a hard enough time already, eh? I’ve never read through a UN resolution before, and didn’t do it this time either, but I did read through the Wikipedia article about the resolution and came across something I found extremely interesting (given that what is written on Wikipedia is actually correct):

Extending the arms embargo on North Korea by banning all weapons exports from the country and most imports, with an exception to small arms, light weapons and related material – though member states must notify the Security Council five days prior to selling the weapons.

Come again? So, you’ve got a country that has nuclear weapons, threatens to make more – and use them if necessary – and it’s OK to sell them conventional weapons? I’m guessing that the weapons industry lobby is very strong in Brussels. That said, I can see why it might be a good thing not to ban weapon imports to the DPRK. They probably would have had the means to get small arms weapons from more shady sources than the legitimate industry, anyway. By controlling the weapons import, whoever needs to know what kind of weapons the North Korean army has access to, knows just that.

In the words of Bill Hicks (from his “Revelations” tour):

You know we armed Iraq. I wondered about that too, you know. During the Persian Gulf war, those intelligence reports would come out: “Iraq: incredible weapons — incredible weapons.” “How do you know that?” “Uh, well… we looked at the receipts. But as soon as that check clears, we’re goin’ in.”

For most of us, though, North Korea is not an immediate problem. Neither is the banning of Coke Zero in Venezuela. What we should probably worry about is the swine flu.

I’m guessing you have heard of the swine flu. It was the number one headline everywhere for days after it was identified in Mexico in April. The first reports that came in said that people were dropping like flies and judgment day was imminent. But, after a while, things cooled down a little and for a while the flu dropped completely off the media radar. Even when the WHO on June 11 declared the outbreak to be a pandemic it didn’t create much media fuss. That in spite of the fact that it’s the first pandemic declared by the WHO since the 1968-1969 Hong Kong Flu, which killed an estimated one million people world wide.

But, hang on, there’s no need to panic yet. Even though the swine flu outbreak is now categorized as a phase 6 pandemic, the most severe phase, it’s a phase 6 because of the global spread of the virus, and not its severity: Of the roughly 30,000 confirmed cases of the swine flu so far, only 146 people have died, making the mortality rate quite low. The reason why the WHO categorized it as a phase 6 is that it reminds them of the Spanish Flu.

Now it’s OK to panic.

You see, the Spanish Flu (1918-1920) killed an estimated 50 million to 100 million people world wide. As with the current swine flu pandemic, it started out quite slow and wasn’t too deadly at first. The Spanish Flu also killed off people who were normally healthy, aged 14 to 45, an age segment that is normally not too affected by the flu. So it might be that we have another Spanish Flu on our hands. Of course, the world looks very different now in terms of health care, medical science and similar, but still – better safe than sorry. So if your local pig farmer doesn’t look too good, try to avoid French kissing him!

My point with all this is that we should probably try to live the good life no matter how bad the future looks. And does it really look that bad? For instance, right now you probably don’t have the swine flu, it’s quite possible that you don’t live somewhere that North Korean nuclear weapons can reach and you probably have relatively easy access to Coke Zero – all good things. Try to appreciate it.

“Carpe diem” is a washed out cliché, but it has some truth to it as well.