Sent til festen, mest en note til mig selv

Hvis det stod til indvandrere og flygtninge her i landet ville 169 mandater gå til oppositionen; 6 til Venstre; K og O ville begge være ude af Folketinget. Jeg kopierer en stor del af artiklen, fordi nyhedsmedierne har en grim vane med at slette artikler efter noget tid, og den her vil jeg med stor sandsynlighed tage frem igen:

Massivt rødt flertal blandt indvandrere

Offentliggjort 27.01.10 kl. 15:02

Venstre ville med seks mandater være Folketingets mindste parti. Både De Konservative og Dansk Folkeparti ville ryge under spærregrænsen og dermed ud af Folketinget.

Det viser en meningsmåling blandt 1.055 repræsentativt udvalgte indvandrere og flygtninge, som Catinét har gennemført for Ritzau.

Til gengæld ville Socialdemokraterne, SF, De Radikale og Enhedslisten sidde tungt på magten med samlet 169 mandater.

Socialdemokraterne ville med 94 mandater være tingets største parti og alene have absolut flertal. [...]

De Radikale ville få 11 mandater, mens SF står til hele 56 mandater i målingen. Enhedslisten ville få otte mandater.

Målingen er gennemført fra den 17. december til den 7. januar som en del af Catinéts tilbagevendende interviewundersøgelse Integrationsstatus.

Deltagerne er flygtninge, indvandrere og deres efterkommere fra Pakistan, Tyrkiet, Somalia, Eksjugoslavien, Iran, Irak, Libanon, Palæstina samt statsløse.

Cirka 80 procent er muslimer.

(Selvfølgelig) via Kim Møller. Jeg betragter ovenstående som nogle fakta, der leverer et stærkt argument imod levedygtigheden af en model med åbne grænser og lukkede kasser.

Promoting the unknown, a continuing series

“Clementi you say? Never heard of the guy!” – Here’s wikipedia on Muzio Clementi. Here (unfortunately ‘among other things…’) you can find previous posts in the series.

Update: I see that youtube has disabled the embedding feature when it comes to Gilels’ recording (the last of the vids). I didn’t know that when I posted it, otherwise I’d have chosen another interpretation of that piece/another piece. Anyway, now it’s posted, and it’s well worth it to click the link to the video.

The Innocents Abroad III

Previous posts about the book here and here.

I was robbed of a few days of reading due to unforeseen family matters I had to attend to, so I haven’t had as much time to read as I’d hoped during the last days. However, I have completed Twain and started Shakespeare. I am still undecided as to whether I shall post a fourth post on the book after this one or not, there’s so much good stuff in there I really have a hard time not sharing some of those wonderful quotes. Ok, here goes:

“We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can “show off” and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can’t shake off. All our passengers are paying strict attention to this thing, with the end in view which I have mentioned. The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and call him my brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I shall have finished my travels.”

(this is how that specific page in my book looks now:

I (almost) always destroy my books like this. If I quote something from a book on this blog, you can be pretty sure I’ve outlined the passage in the book too. You can also be sure that there are a lot of passages that I didn’t quote in the blog post which I outlined when reading the book.)

…

“In Venice, to-day, a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants, there are twelve hundred priests. Heaven only knows how many there were before the Parliament reduced their numbers.” [...] “As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it. She is to-day one vast museum of magnificence and misery. All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals.”

…

“There are more Princes than policemen in Naples – the city is infested with them.”

…

“After browsing among the stately ruins of Rome, of Baiæ, of Pompeii, and after glancing down the long marble ranks of battered and nameless imperial heads that stretch down the corridors of the Vatican, one thing strikes me with a force it never had before: the unsubstantial, unlasting character of fame. Men lived long lives, in the olden time, and struggled feverishly through them, toiling like slaves, in oratory, in generalship, or in literature, and then laid them down and died, happy in the possession of an enduring history and a deathless name. Well, twenty little centuries flutter away, and what is left of these things? A crazy inscription on a block of stone, which snuffy antiquaries bother over and tangle up and make nothing out of but a bare name (which they spell wrong) – no history, no tradition, no poetry – nothing that can give it even a passing interest. What may be left of General Grant’s great name forty centuries hence? This – in the Encyclopedia for A.D. 5868, possibly:
‘Uriah S. (or Z.) Graunt – popular poet of ancient times in the Aztec provinces of the United States of British America. Some authors say flourished about A.D. 742; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states that he was a cotemporary of Scharkspyre, the English poet, and flourished about A.D. 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan war instead of before it. He wrote ‘Rock me to Sleep, Mother.’
These thoughts sadden me. I will to bed.”

…

“Circassian and Georgian girls are still sold in Constantinople by their parents, but not publicly. The great slave marts we have all read so much about – where tender young girls were stripped for inspection, and criticised and discussed just as if they were horses at an agricultural fair – no longer exist. The exhibition and the sales are private now. Stocks are up, just at present, partly because of a brisk demand created by the recent return of the Sultan’s suite from the courts of Europe; partly on account of an unusual abundance of breadstuffs, which leaves holders untortured by hunger and enables them to hold back for high prices; and partly because buyers are too weak to bear the market, while sellers are amply prepared to bull it. [...] Prices are pretty high now, and holders firm; but, two or three years ago, parents in a starving condition brought their young daughters down here and sold them for even twenty or thirty dollars*, when they could do no better, simply to save themselves and the girls from dying of want. It is sad to think of so distressing a thing as this, and I for one am sincerely glad the prices are up again.”

*This is, according to info provided in a section I left out of the quote, appr. equal to a tenth of the current rate, which is around 200-300 dollars/girl.

…

“In the morning we sent for donkeys. It is worthy of note that we had to send for these things. I said Damascus was an old fossil, and she is. Any where else we would have been assailed by a clamorous army of donkey-drivers, guides, peddlers and beggars – but in Damascus they so hate the very sight of a foreign Christian that they want no intercourse whatever with him; only a year or two ago, his person was not always safe in Damascus streets. It is the most fanatical Mohammedan purgatory out of Arabia.”

Later on Twain mentions in passing a “mausoleum of the five thousand Christians who were massacred in Damascus in 1861 by the Turks” – that was 6 years earlier. Not exactly hospitable territory, it would probably be safe to say.

…

“Magdala is not a beautiful place. It is thoroughly Syrian, and that is to say that it is thoroughly ugly, and cramped, squalid, uncomfortable, and filthy…”

I’d sign that

Jorge Cham.

The Far Side

Ok, so it’s been a while since I’ve mentioned Gary Larson’s wonderful comics…

Next time some geek you know have a birthday party, there’s one present (/s)he’ll with some probability forget to put on the list: This. If that geek is you, remember to put it on the list, if it isn’t, just remember that this is a very good present option. No, I have not been paid anything by Larson or anybody else to post this (I’d wish…), but if you’re the type of person who’d love Larson’s comics, in my opinion it’d really be a shame if you never got the chance to be exposed to his wonderful work.

Here’s one sample (click to view in a higher resolution):

Here’s wikipedia’s article about the comic strip. I’ve said it before: If you don’t get Larson’s comics, you’ll never really get me.

Meta

Jeg målte et blodsukker på 1.9 mmol/l i går aftes. Som altid var forklaringen ‘human error’, og netop dén fejl vil jeg næppe begå igen lige med det første. Sidste gang jeg målte et blodsukker på det niveau, var jeg i kontakt med ambulancereddere under et kvarter senere. Jeg har før været bevidstløs med et blodsukker højere end det. Jeg formåede selv at afværge en katastrofe denne gang, men tænkte i den forbindelse, at jeg hellere måtte gøre noget helt klart:

Hvis bloggen pludseligt ophører med at blive opdateret uden at jeg giver nogen forklaring her, og inaktiviteten fortsætter over længere tid (ie. en måned eller mere), er den mest sandsynlige årsag, at jeg er død. Statistisk vil de mest sandsynlige forklaringer herpå igen være: a) svær hypoglykæmi, b) (trafik)ulykke eller c) selvmord.

Bare så I ved det.

The Innocents Abroad II

I have had my last exam for this semester by now, but I haven’t spent much time (book-)reading since then. I expect to spend the next couple of days reading, however for now a few quotes from Mark Twain will have to do (I still love it! – and if you like the quotes, you will too):

“They say that a pagan temple stood where Notre Dame now stands, in the old Roman days, eighteen or twenty centuries ago – remains of it are still preserved in Paris; and that a Christian church took its place about A.D. 300; another took the place of that in A.D. 500; and that the foundations of the present Cathedral were laid about A.D. 1100. The ground ought to be measurably sacred by this time, one would think.”

…

“Crowds, composed of both sexes and nearly all ages, were frisking about the garden or sitting in the open air in front of the flag-staff and the temple, drinking wine and coffee, or smoking. The dancing had not begun, yet. Ferguson said there was to be an exhibition. The famous Blondin was going to perform on a tight-rope in another part of the garden. We went thither. [...] Blondin came out shortly. He appeared on a stretched cable, far away above the sea of tossing hats and handkerchiefs, and in the glare of the hundreds of rockets that whizzed heavenward by him he looked like a wee insect. He balanced his pole and walked the lenght of his rope – two or three hundred feet; he came back and got a man and carried him across; he returned to the centre and danced a jig; next he performed some gymnastic and balancing feats too perilous to afford a pleasant spectacle; and he finished by fastening to his person a thousand Roman candles, Catherine wheels, serpents and rockets of all manner of brilliant colors, setting them on fire all at once and walking and waltzing across his rope again in a blinding blaze of glory that lit up the garden and people’s faces like a great conflagration at midnight.”

The entertainment industry has changed somewhat in the time that has passed. It seems this was the kind of thing you’d go out and do in the evening if you were rich and had a lot of spare time 150 years ago. Point also being you had to go out not to get bored to death; no tv, no radio, no internet, no nothing (besides books). In terms of standards today, I’d probably rather break my arm than to spend an hour or more looking at some guy doing line-dancing tricks (also, a famous line-danser? Seriously?). Pretty sure I’m not alone.

…

“In Paris we often saw in shop windows the sign, “English Spoken Here,” just as one sees in the windows at home the sign, “Ici on parle francaise.”* We always invaded these places at once – and invariably received the information, framed in faultless french, that the clerk who did the English for the establishment had just gone to dinner and would be back in an hour – would Monsieur buy something? We wondered why those parties happened to take their dinners at such erratic and extraordinary hours, for we never called at a time when an exemplary Christian would be in the least likely to be abroad on such an errand.”

*the 2. comma in the first sentense was placed inside the quotation marks in the original and there was no cédille in the original under the c in française, for one reason or another.

…

(…) “Genoa. I think there is a church every three or four hundred yards all over town. The streets are sprinkled from end to end with shovel-hatted, long-robed, well-fed priests, and the church bells by dozens are pealing all the day long, nearly. Every now and then one comes across a friar of orders gray, with shaven head, long, coarse robe, rope girdle and beads, and with feet cased in sandals or entirely bare. These worthies suffer in the flesh, and do penance all their lives, I suppose, but they look like consummate famine-breeders. They are all fat and serene.”

…

“It is hard to forget repulsive things. I remember yet how I ran off from school once, when I was a boy, and then, pretty late at night, concluded to climb into the window of my father’s office and sleep on a lounge, because I had a delicacy about going home and getting thrashed. [...] When I reached home, they whipped me, but I enjoyed it. It seemed perfectly delightful.”

There’s also a long passage describing some fist-fights the sailors had with the locals over a period of three days, but I decided not to quote that. It’s obvious that the general attitude towards the use of violence was very different back then.

…

“The priests [in the Cathedral of Milan] showed us two of St. Paul’s fingers, and one of St. Peter’s; a bone of Judas Iscariot, (it was black) and also bones of all the other disciples; a handkerchief in which the Saviour had left the impression of his face. Among the most precious of the relics were a stone from the Holy Sepulchre, part of the crown of thorns, (they have a whole one at Notre Dame,) a fragment of the purple robe worn by the Saviour, a nail from the Cross, and a picture of the Virgin and Child painted by the veritable hand of St. Luke. This is the second of St. Luke’s Virgins we have seen. Once a year all these holy relics are carried in procession through the streets of Milan.”

…

Here you can read my first post about the book in case you missed it.

Islamic solidarity games

I know I’ve already posted one comic today, but this is just pure gold and deserves a wider audience:

Also notice the headline of the Guardian article Mo is reading.

Compromise

Link.

Random sentiments

1. Most people will hurt you if you give them the chance to do so.

2. We’re all basically still just monkeys walking around in fancy clothes.

3. To be self-destructive can be ‘a way of life’.

4. People talk way too much in general.

5. Politeness is underrated.

6. Established habits make most people greatly underestimate just how complicated their lives really are.

Hvorfor stoppe der?

Jeg kan ikke finde ud af, om den her kommentar er alvorligt ment. At jeg overhovedet er i tvivl om manden er ironisk, er såmænd tæt på at gøre mig skør, og jo mere jeg kigger på kommentaren, jo mere overbevist bliver jeg om, at manden er dødsensalvorlig. Hr. Laurids Larsen’s kommentar i sin helhed, under overskriften ‘Mad til de ældre’:

“Det er en kendsgerning, at mange ældre ikke får tilstrækkelig sund og nærende kost. Men det er der råd for.

Karen Ellemann begynder et indlæg i Politiken med ordene: »Vi har i Danmark unikke muligheder for at sikre en forebyggende indsats over for nogle af samfundets svageste borgere.«

Så løsningen må være en generel madordning for ældre.

Den kommunale mad bringes dagligt til de berørte. De ældre spares for den besværlige vej til supermarkedet, hvor de tit vil falde for de billigste underlødige tilbud, og der vil blive beskæftigelse til et stort antal personer til fremstilling og udbringning af maden.

Er det ikke netop projekter af denne slags, som vi har Folketinget til at tage sig af?”

…

Det korte svar: Nej, det er det ikke. Og det er faktisk ikke godt i sig selv at en offentlig ordning skaber arbejdspladser, det betyder bare, at der bliver færre hænder til at finansiere de offentlige ordninger, fordi de folk, der beskæftiges i det offentlige, ikke kan beskæftiges i det private (/i samme grad) og på den måde betale for de offentlige ordninger. Bare fordi de ældre ikke betaler for ydelsen, betyder ikke at maden og udbringningen ikke koster en masse penge; det er faktisk netop fordi maden og udbringningen koster en masse penge, at ikke flere ældre i dag selv betaler for ydelser som disse.

Det lidt længere svar: Der er også mange unge og midaldrende, der falder for “de billigste underlødige tilbud” og spiser meget usundt, så hvorfor egentligt ikke lade ordningen omfatte alle? Jeg er også dødtræt af at skulle ned i butikkerne hele tiden for at købe ind. Mange danskere spiser faktisk også alt for meget, så at lade Folketinget regulere det her område vil være en let måde at komme en stor del af fedmeproblemet til livs; det er relativt nemt at kalorieregulere forsyningen, så de fede ikke har mulighed for at fortsætte deres usunde livsstil, hvis det er eksperter, der sammensætter kosten. Hvis vi skal se på en sådan model i et historisk perspektiv, er der meget som taler for implementering af en sådan model: Hverken USSR eller Kina havde nævneværdige problemer med fedme-relaterede sygdomme mens Stalin og Mao var ved magten og havde næsten fuld kontrol over fødevareforsyningen. Se evt. her og her. Eller her for et mere nutidigt eksempel.

A Soviet Fashion Show

I found the link here. This one is good too:

So, Danish readers, remind me again which of these people a politician like Karen Ellemann resembles the most?

The latest project

I played this piece some years ago, but I never got very far. My fingers weren’t strong enough and I didn’t have the agility necessary to get the Poco piú lento, not to talk of the Doppio movimento, right, so I basically just perfected the first 2.45 or so in the video and just let it go eventually without completing it. I’ll try to get through it this time, it’s a wonderful piece I’d really love to be able to play. Incidentally, I know it’s supposed to be ‘twice the speed’ but I still think Lugansky’s playing the doppio movimento sequence too fast, it’d been a lot more expressive if he’d slowed down just a little.

Update:

I should of course have added the fact that even if this is the latest project, it’s not the only piece I’m working on at the moment. Ever since I heard this recording by Annie Fischer, I’ve wanted to play the andante molto and adagio part of the 3rd movement of Brahms’ 3rd piano sonata, ie. the first ~3.30 or so of the video below, very badly, and I recently managed to procure the sheet, so, yeah…

Random wikipedia links of interest

(/Well, I found them interesting…)

1) Banach–Tarski paradox

2) Origin of the domestic dog

3) War of the Polish Succession

4) Lotka–Volterra equation

5) Empire of Brazil

My last comment on econlog

A mail I sent just a short while ago to Lauren Landsburg. Landsburg had previously sent me a mail stating that: If you supply a false email address again or violate any other EconLog policies, you will be banned.

I am considering removing econlog from my blogroll because of this and this despite the fact that Arnold Kling’s posts are usually very good. However, if these people don’t think my comments are welcome, I see no reason to link to them and a ban threat is enough for me to get very pissed, I’ve never been treated like this before. My email:

Now I almost dare not even answering your mail…

I would never supply a false email address on purpose. The email account I supplied in the last comment was not a false one, it is an active account I’ve used before on various blogs without any problems. I have once before made you aware that that particular email-account was active, but I know you can’t keep track of all that stuff and the blame is all mine; I should have remembered that that particular email address was not good enough for econlog.

I think informed comments such as those I left in the particular comment section in question and the discussion these comments sparked is part of why a lot of people read econlog. If the moderation is as tough as you make it sound, I’m not going to participate in similar discussions on econlog in the future. I’m sure a lot of people also don’t and that you’re missing out. If you sometimes communicate with Kling/Caplan/Henderson (I don’t know how you do these things), you can tell them that.

If you ban me at some point in the future, you’ll just be doing your job and I’ll have no reason to have any hard feelings. There’s no great likelihood you will have to do this, because as I have already by accident made more than one infraction according to your rules, I will not comment on econlog again and risk being unable to see the debate to it’s proper end. It might sound strange to you, but I’d much rather not comment than be banned. You can tell Kling/Caplan/Henderson that too if you like. I’ve never been banned from a site ever and I’m not about to let that happen now.

I have already taken up way too much of your time, there’s no need to answer this comment with another email.

The relevant comment section is this one. The ‘fun’ part is that all this started because one of my comments was withheld automatically, requiring me to email the editor just to get the comment posted on the site. First the editor introduces a cost like this, then he blames me for wasting his time. The only reason I used a different email account the second time was because I was annoyed by the fact that every comment I wrote had to pass through Landsburg before getting posted (because I had been selected for email evaluation earlier, when there was no problem with my email), and I thought that if this withholding requirement was linked to the email, a different active email would be preferable to utilize given the circumstances.

The politeness criteria I incidentally think the site can do without. If Landsburg was being polite when he was mailing with me, they most certainly won’t need to ban anyone for not being that. In the last email to me, Landsburg wasn’t being polite. He was being a jerk.

Quote of the day

If marriage was a manufactured product it would be promptly banned in many countries due to its outrageous failure rate and the damage caused by the failures.

‘Doug’, here.

Metabolism and nutrition – diabetes

A very good lecture:

An (almost) perfect game

1…e6 and 6…h6 were not recommended by Fritz (a computer chess program), however besides from those two moves, every single one of my moves (I was black) were recommended by the program. This despite the fact that I almost never play the Queens gambit with black (which I ended up doing despite my first move), and thus do not know this type of position as well as I probably should. Fritz’ default setting lets it recommend two different moves at each juncture, so this close correspondence between the computer’s moves and mine isn’t that big a deal; however I still do believe that the close match between my moves and the program’s moves is related to the fact that I understand the game a lot better than I used to. I didn’t play (m?)any of these kinds of games a few years ago. Before, I tended to win my games by making fewer/smaller mistakes than my opponents, whereas on the other hand now it happens fairly regularly that I play a game without making any mistakes worth mentioning if my opponent is significantly weaker than I am.

I’m a much better player than I was two-three years ago, and I’m right now actually considering going back to some form of tournament chess. At the moment only considering it though; it would be a very big step for me to take.

Friends…

The average number is about 150, says leading anthropologist Robin Dunbar.

It may sound like a lot, but think of your Christmas card list – 50 cards to 50 couples = 100 friends.

“It’s the number of people that you know as persons and you know how they fit into your social world and they know how you fit into theirs. They are a group of people to which you have an obligation of friendship.”

They usually consist of an inner circle of five “core” people and an additional layer of 10, he says. That makes 15 people – some will probably be family members – who are your central group and then outside that, there’s another 35 in the next circle and another 100 on the outside. And that’s one person’s social world.

Here’s the link, via MR. That’s one huge social world. I don’t think it makes sense to call the guy in the inner circle the same as the guy in the outer circle.

I found this comment by ‘Dave B’ rather funny: A friend is the one who comes to the police station at 3am to pay your bail, a best friend is the one who is sitting next to you in the cell saying “dude, did you see that?!!” The only people I’d be able to call in a situation like that would be my parents, and I’d be alone in the cell.

On a related note, I find it somewhat annoying that people tend to believe that if you don’t have a lot of friends, at least the ones you do have (the implicit assumption hidden here is killing me!) are close friends. It doesn’t always work like that, sometimes that particular tradeoff doesn’t exist at all; some people, for one reason or another, just don’t have anyone at all.

Holy */#[%#!

Jeg kom lige til at tænke på, at der faktisk findes et bundt totalt fremmede, ukendte mennesker, de fleste af hvilke formentligt aldrig nogensinde har mødt mig, som helt frivilligt sætter sig ned og bruger tid på at læse nogle af de ting, jeg skriver på min blog.

Det er faktisk ret vildt at tænke på.