An observation on corruption

In a report about corruption in Montenegro, I saw the interesting observation that a contributory factor to relatively high and stubborn corruption is

a small population where it is almost a statistical certainty that persons in key leadership positions will be related

Presumably also, there will be plenty of family ties between the government and the mafia. We know from something to be published shortly on my website that there are a large number of small arms floating around, presumably making Christmas a rather tense affair.

mid-slither

All I have done since I came in is use energy. I turnded on the computer, which is slowly, loudly rendering a movie uploadable. I put bread in the toaster, and I have boiled a kettle (must dash and make cuppa). I have now put the toaster on again, after which I will probably use some hot water in shaving. But it's all okay, because I went for a totally carbon-free bike ride, down to the Danubiana art gallery (as it turned out: -be, not -ben). Except... I picked some flowers. Okay, defenceless eco-vandal. And now I'm carbonally writing about it.

Ilona took my camera to Transylvania; since she does not arrive back until late this evening, I couldn't take said camera on my bike ride, but if I had, I would have shown pictures of:

• a dog and its reflection gambolling along the bank of the canal
• a roadkill snake, squished in mid-slither and sss-shaped but perfectly flat
• (possibly) my bike chain against a background of the big machinery used to control the locks at the reservoir (thus proving that things which look similar can have different applications)
  

Even with a camera I couldn't have taken a picture of the special shit-squared sewage scent from the plant five minutes down the cycle path from my street, but I'm sure you have the means to imagine. Typical Bratislavan planning non-sense. Otherwise, the path is a good one, almost entirely intact with a minimum of potholes and several good watering holes along the way. And with Spring arriving in earnest in the last days, very well used this afternoon. Sadly, in contrast to its fine outoftown cycling, there is not a single bike rack in the centre of the city. I even asked a policeman. Maybe I'll write to the city government.

Last: I just finished reading With their backs to the world, by Asne Seierstad, about Serbian people, which was by turns depressing and more depressing, albeit with a few lighter moments. Entirely journalist, neither introduced nor concluded, just presented. I wish I'd read it before we wrote our Serbia report. The nutcases lead normal lives, and the superstars are frail and not 100% sympathetic. And Robert Mugabe does yoga every morning, and Vitler was a hedgetarian...

Take these words, rearrange any set of them in any order, and assign a UN High Representative

What is the logic behind a UN Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and the Small Island Developing States?

The body is evil and must be punished

1) Slovak word of the day is bolest', for what my thighs, arse and hamstrings are feeling. Yesterday morning I played squash for the first time, and will definitely play again. It is a gruelling game which requires you to save for new knees for your second fifty years, but extremely satisfying. I think I probably came last in the tournament, but it was none the less thrilling for that. I also suck at ping pong, but I've played that before so can say it with some certainty. After cycling home, I fell into bed and headbuzz lost out to body mutiny; I slept the sleep of the greedy, right in the middle of the day. Now, having decided the hair of the dog was the best cure and cycled ten kilometres, I am in a hot bath getting tender. But I taught myself to cycle with no hands, so all is very good.

2) If you'll allow the contrivance, Tibet is supposedly quite a spiritual place, so let us call it the soul, in contrast to material, mechnical China, which can be the body. So, Beijing: what should be done? For basic side-taking, it's hard to not go for the underdog, but that is made more complicated when every ethnic Han Chinese shop in Lhasa is burned to the ground by the cuddly people of unfree Tibet. Don't get me wrong, I think Free Tibet is right - a group more or less clearly defined, having suffered decades of foul suppression by an infinitely more powerful neighbour, should have the right to its (monkocratic) self-setermination. And since the Tibetans aren't even asking for independence, rather autonomy (presumably meaning being left entorely to their own thing and bargaining with China on an equalish footing), Chinese intransigence loses the ethical battle for me. (Yes, they're worried about the rest of the empire splitting up, but I'm not one for big countries; the more splitting up, under federal structures, the better.)

But the tone with which Tibet is approached is somewhat disappointing, like the more black and white attitudes you hear toward Kosova, or Palestine, or any of the number of less sexy cases. Maybe it's a selfish and aesthetics-based view of the world but I much prefer arguments to be made thoughtfully and with a view to solving a problem. Recognising that more will inevitably be created in so doing (viz a thousand examples, including the last time the West boycotted the Olympics, due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to get rid of the people who then launched jihad on said West).

Eventually you realise that everyone is bad in the right circumstances. I thought There Will Be Blood was a fine film, and it made this point among others very nicely.

(Regarding the persecution of Han Chinese by ethnic Tibetans recently, what can we do other than deplore all violence? And where does that leave those throwing off their yokes? In Estonia, Russians who were settled there by the Soviet leadership are now legally, in an EU country, second-class citizens - but on the other hand, all they have to do is learn Estonian: easy, right?)

More pics, oops-lost:

We started in La Herradura with Jess and Sam.

and went through snow

A characteristic pose.


I'm bereft, Joe has left, Prague, Berlin and home ag'in. But at least I have some pictures from his stay.


From Skalnate Pleso, last weekend, after a gorgeous hike and before a glass of hot wine. We ran into the colleague responsible for localising the MDGs. UNDP is everywhere.


In Stary Smokovec, waiting for the train and writing postcards.


The tastiest thing about the canteen we kept ending up in. The restaurant Koliba, just over the train track, is the one to look for. Albas Koliba is also good; Albus nightclub is not.

We were in Budapest during International Pillow Fight Club, armed with cameras but sadly not with pillows.

Flab dog in the ducksnow.

The Gomboc is the second Hungarian invention to reach the front cover of The Mathematical Intelligencer, the first being the Rubik cube.

After Palestrina, at the totally wicked Palace of Arts in Budapest (also the location of the Gomboc above). The opera was very interestingly produced, and the singers were excellent. What's more, the story (16th century Catholic politics) was a good one for opera, I think.

Joe at the castle.

unusual language

A remarkable example of a plain-speaking UN report (Word)

• The project failed to understand the realities of Kosovo. Weapons in exchange for development (WED) only works when weapons are owned by the community. In societies where weapons are owned by individuals a communal approach does not provide the appropriate incentives.
• Incentives have to be attractive. Kosovo has received relatively substantial development aid and aid linked to weapons surrender was not so attractive as for communities who had not seen much aid prior to the WED project.
• Project administrators did not listen sufficiently to local people. Project administrators should have listened to the community leaders from the selected municipalities who informed UNDP that they could no longer participate as they could not guarantee to produce any meaningful results in terms of weapons collected against the background of a deteriorating security situation.
• The period for the amnesty of one month was too short.
• The project management made a ‘panic’ decision to extend to all communities half way through the collection process.

I guess admissions of failure are rare enough not to have become complacent and jargonised.

libraries

So, it's hard to get the original version of Beggin' by Frankie Valli on the internet. This prompted the following highly speculative stream of consciousness.

It's not Limewire that's poxy, it's the way the freedom of information exchange offered by the internet (perhaps ironically) narrows our choices through herd tendencies and averaging.

For clarity, my thought: the volume of Stuff increases exponentially, through increasing amounts of online presence (websites, blogs, file-sharing). So in theory, everything (every viewpoint, alternative history, version of a song) can be online, and a great deal of content is. But the internet is not an encyclodaedia, and is too big to make an encyclopaedia from; Google is not (yet) up to the task. Further, a) fashion persists, and things like the remix of this song come to be the only thing anyone is interested in; pieces of human experience from pre-digital times are especially vulnerable to being excluded. This is even more important in a time when Online is looked to as the resource for the world.

Obscure items, even if desirable, don't come highly up the page rank algorithm, and where accessibility is reinforced by links to your page , say, you have a negative feedback cycle, and obscure items become more obscure. At the same time, a lot of that volume of Stuff is very samey. Do ratings systems in Web 2.0 make for 'quality' items being kept for posterity? This is not new to the internet as an archiving/memory bank, but given that we are supposed to be perfecting the world, it's sad that it persists. One difference is that previously, recording history was done by relatively few people - in libraries, museums, and their prejudices or inaccessibility meant that much did not get kept. On a global scale, there are still perhaps relatively few people managing what gets kept, but it is incomparably easier to create content now than it was, and to share and transport it.

There are probably self-appointed guardians of taste and quality, in the form of online communities interested in particular issues, blogging networks, listservs and so on. But again those will be proliferating, and are not reliably signposted, certainly for casual surfers. The most you can hope for I guess is to get into a comfortable online zone and accept that the revolutionary promise of the internet is an illusion...

There was a b), but it's gone out of my head. And now I have to go and teach. Ahojte!