After the second world war, the law was changed for the legal purges in Norway, so as to execute Quislings, the Nazi sympathisers. Technically, Norway had the death penalty for high treason until 1979, but the last execution was in 1948.

Obviously, there will be no death penalty for Behring Breivik, and because of a police computer-system cock-up, he cannot be sentenced to 31 years, the upcoming limit for “acts of terrorism”. So the maximum ordinary sentence he can receive is 21 years, a “life” sentence. Norway do not do that weird thing of multiple life sentences. But he can be sentenced to a complicated melange based on his mental health/capacity, that might keep him locked up for as long as he lives. They then have to prove he is just the right amount of bonkers.

Today, as I write this, he is present at the first public hearing in court, and he introduced himself as a knight and a military commander of the Norwegian resistance. He sees himself as a freedom fighter that had to do terrible things for the common good. So in his mind, he is related to those who was interned at Grini during the war. He fights for freedom against Goliath-odds.

He questioned the judges ability to give him a fair trial, as they are “representatives of multiculturalism”. The guy is obviously deluded, but he is not mad. We should not give him the benefit of the mad lable.

Norway’s justice system, unlike some other countries, are based on the premise that people can change, they can learn, they can repay. Repent and be free. Statistically, this works, as the percentage of re-convictions are low compared to other European countries. So this case is a large problem for the justice system, and for the prevailing sense of justice. Fact is, there are few people in this country that would not like to see him boil and burn.

A friend set up this scenario; if you are out driving, and accidentally hit someone with your car, and then discovered it was Behring Breivik, would your reaction pattern be different? I would say yes. I would think a lot of people would, if not directly celebrate, then at least take their time in calling an ambulance; a sense of guilt greatly diminished. Some people would get back in the car and back up over him again.

We are uncomfortable with these feelings. Other people do terrible things too, and victims of other crimes may suffer just as much, but the sheer scale of this guys actions makes it a very public problem. He has committed atrocities, we want him to suffer. That is the point of prison, that is the point of punishment. We have the justice system so that the punishments do not get out of proportions. We want criminals to see what we see, and we want them to suffer in new-found understanding, then we want them to become clear-eyed, honest, upstanding pillars of society.

But deep down, I do not think we want this for Behring Breivik. Norway will uphold the justice system. And we will all quietly hate it for this one man.

EDIT.

As His Loopyness is unfolding – should I say unravelling – it becomes more clear he has a severe mental illness. Paranoid schizophrenic, they say. Quite possibly. But here is the curious thing: people seem to be outraged by that. Why? They want him punished. They want him in prison, even though a mental hospital would take away more of his freedoms and rights, would control and monitor him closer, would even possibly medicate and cure him, would keep him locked up for longer. Then maybe he will see what we see. If so, who could live with that? How could prison be more punishment?

We have all seen a gorgeous film, A Beautiful Mind. This is the Terrible Mind.

If he is sick, he can be medicated, he can be cured, more or less. That would probably be the greatest punishment of all.

I woke up yesterday, to a flood of warnings on facebook, telling me about this deeply disturbed individual, and that several dogs had already died. Even in my grumpy pre-coffee morning haze, something smelled a little off.

A few hours later the media backtracked, and the mystery was solved. It turned out it was the commendable tradition of Oslo Hash House Harriers, beer-drinkers with a running problem. A very british ex-pat invention, the Hash House Harriers have a hare that leaves a trail, the hounds follow, and beer is consumed at the end. This, incidentaly, is maybe the only kind of fitness group I could see myself join and enjoy. The trail is environmentally friendly sawdust or flour. Figures.

But here is the mystery… how, HOW does this happen? How does the connection of “my dog sniffed some sawdust” go to “my dog sniffed some sawdust and then got diarrhea”, and then to “dogs sniffed sawdust and diiiiied!” then further to “INSANE MAN poisons dogs!” HOW does this happen? Who add that crucial sentence, “man (because that was what it said) poisons dogs, dogs have died”?!

Apparently a pet-shop had a sign up, saying this. But where did it start?! There must be a single human that added drama to the “dog sniffs stuff”, and others who escalates.

The papers contacted the local humane-societies, the veterinary institute, the food safety authority and the police. The society for prevention of cruelty to animals says they have had several reports of sick dogs. The canines are apparently listless, have diarrhea and do not eat well. A far cry from being dead, and certainly not an uncommon malady, partics with the gunky weather here now.

A dog sniffs and licks a million things outside, and some of them enjoy rolling around in dog poo. But how, oh, mystery, hooow did this canard happen?

Facebook is practically untrackable. The information there is nearly impossible to source, and one feather turns into five hens, as the saying goes. People are sentimental, they see a status warning of this terribly disturbed man, and dare not not share it. It is about social conscience. The thing is, if you do not share it, it does not mean that you want dogs killed, but it plays on our love for animals, our conscience, a social responsibility to warn others of possible misfortune. And so it generates, escalates and goes haywire. And viral.

And then the newspapers pick it up, and parrots random facebookers who cannot even spell instead of doing a little research.

Use your heads, people. If you wanted to poison dogs. Would sawdust be the first thing that springs to mind? If dogs have died, do you not think the teary face of the owner of some mutt would be all over the media within 30 seconds of said mutts demise? Dead cats? Birds? Rats? And not the least. Facebook updates with a million exclamation marks after it does not inspire confidence.

I would really like to know how this works: the gears of this process is not easily figured out; the “social media” is a messy tangle with  lots of dead ends. A curious similarity to the aim of the hares of the Hash House Harriers.

Will someone please do some solid research on this?

Note. I said solid.

..and the top pic is of highly-alive Grainne (look up the irish pronounciation), my Aussie dog-friend.

The quality drink their champagne and mockingly toasts the great unwashed people below. Do you not know what a large group of ticked off people can do? You do not even have to read history. You do not even have to leave the timespan of this week. The snowball does not care about what is fair, correct or who is or was responsible. I believe you call it critical mass.

I heard an “expert” say that the protest would never achieve anything, because it is too vague, there is no clear message, they are not united under a common banner. The expert went on to say that the protesters could not achieve anything, because it is like the messy anti-war protest in the sixties.

Come again?! ..and what happened in the sixties, children? Yes, the anti-war protests and the hippies were not exactly homogenous. But things changed.

BBC radio 4 friday night comedy; one of my favourite podcasts. Last fridays NewsQuiz edition was brilliant. Sandi Toksvig, Jeremy Hardy, Andy Hamilton and Fred MacAulay are my best friends on fridays. Pointing out that usually when there is a protest, experts say “this is a few, extremists people”. Except that this time that is not the case. Jeremy Hardy quotes various media having nothing else to say that these are “well educated reasonable people”. How to you deal with that? Funny man.

One of my favourite pictures from Wall St. is one of librarians. Yes, you know things are messed up when librarians starts marching  (I will add the image here later, if the photographer gives me permission). There are guerilla libraries. How can you not love that?

The world is off its trolley, undoubtedly. Winter is coming though, and New York gets cold. Who will continue, and who does not have a choice anymore?

Many of them say they are proud to be Americans. They should not be. They should rant, rave and create change. And then be proud.

These are well behaved people. Maybe they shouldn’t be.

edit:

I will let someone more eloquent than me sketch out some very valid points. Smile or die, from Barbara Ehrenreich, courtesy of th RSA.

If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon

The researcher that wrote the book on media we used in my digital media bachelor, tweeted an article from Discovery News via ABC a while back. Apparently, a bunch of other researchers in USA have researched Facebook, using it as a tool for personality analysis – or more popular term; personality test. They state some depressingly obvious things, but elegantly jump to what I will describe as utter loony-off-their-trolleys conclusions. And no-one bats an eyelid.

They use the methods and categories of sociology (I will not say “traditionally used in..”, as this lends it an air of antiquity which it does not deserve or merit), and from the information people give about themselves, they test if that is consistent with other personality tests. Apparently. Apart from the fact that I suspect a lot of personality tests are utter rubbish, this seems a little scientifically thin to me. “Sociology Mickey-Mouse-science looks through tech”. Nevermind. Let me quote a conclution from ABC’s article:

“The researchers also found that people with long last names tended to be more neurotic, perhaps because “a lifetime of having one’s long last name misspelled may lead to a person expressing more anxiety and quickness to anger,” according to the study, which is being presented this week at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Vancouver.”

Read that again. We take these people seriously? We pay them? We let them play in their labs for this? They spend electricity, occupy space as they come up with this? I find a lot of sociology methodology highly questionable, but this is bonkers. Hot air conjured up from hot air. Oh, wait, .. duh. I actually checked the publish date on this article, to be absolutely sure it was not an aprils fool.

But the rant does not end there. The guy who tweeted, whose books was on my curriculum, is the guy the media calls when they need a “social media expert” (how the meta-levels on this works is mind-boggling). I tweeted back to him, asking if he seriously thought that people with long surnames are more neurotic than others? His disturbing answer was “science has spoken!”

As I said, it is a granfalloon.

Maybe I got it all wrong. Maybe this is an endlessly intelligent study, a wonderfully insightful paper and wondrous presentations. If so, the journalist at Discovery News should find something else to do. Communication: it is so hard that not even journalists and communication media PhD’ers can do it.

This was a harrowing project. The good mr. Resneck is a freelance journalist not a computer geek, so he was early having a blog, and had not upgraded since WP version 2 from 2005. It sat innocently on his providers server, and it gave me a fright. Software that is more than two years old, let alone six is very scary. Very.

Apart from the appallingly large hacking issues with this version, WP 2 lacked pretty much all of the safety features, backups, revisions and export. Particularly the lack of export was scary and annoying. So, quiet as a mouse, I sat down one day, and very, very carefully upgraded through nine levels or so. That is, you can usually upgrade WP and skip a version maybe two, but there are points in this ascent you should not skip.. and how do you find out which? You know it when you have done it, and it all goes to rat shit.

WP updates the database in this process in some versions, so just climb, carefully… to 3.2. I breathed a sigh of relief when I got to the version that let me export to xml, at least then I could reinstall WP and start from scratch. So I tiptoed through Getz, Dexter, Breckner, Tyner, Coltrane, Baker and Carmen, breathed a sigh of relief as Thelonious and Reinhardt wizzed by. And if you think they only have one version each, think again.

The good thing is; nothing WordPress, can scare me now.

The art of looking sideways
Alan Fletcher
This is how it looks like inside my head. It a fountain of musings, facts, the odd, solid, and whimsical. It is design, doodles, unfinished thoughts, images, drawings. It is colours, shapes and wisdom. It is a delight and frustration at the same time – if I could show what goes on in my head, this is pretty much it..
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I should have stayed home
Roger Rapoport, Marguerita Castanera
Very funny. About all the glorious trips and travels that goes wrong. A collections of discomfort, disaster and disappointments. Timbuktu is not like you’d think. Not a homage to the well-planned, but rather an honest picture of how things can go, regardless of preparations.

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the IRA
Tim Pat Coogan
There’s a lot of junk about the IRA out there; a lot of rubbish. This is not without it’s faults and exhausting going-ons, but it is one of the better ones.
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All the trouble in the world – the lighter side of famine, pestilence, destruction and death
P.J O’Rourke
O’Rourke should not be read in one sitting – he can be exhausting and a little too much. But he IS funny, cynical and sometimes, dead on. All the trouble in the world is not always what it looks like, or what some would like us to believe.
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The great war for civilisation – the conquest of the middle east
Robert Fisk
Depressing, informative, exhausting and impressive. It is very good, and the good Mr. Fisk is a relentless journalist, not letting sleeping dogs lie.
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Thinking with type
Ellen Lupton
Despite this being part of the curriculum, it is very, very good! Hah! Imagine that – a first class book in an educational institution… what marvels…
It gives a good, sensible introduction to typography, without the annoying, sentimental waffle often found in such books.
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The elements of typographic style
Robert Bringhurst
Clearly for the especially interested – but the book on the subject. In-depth, clear and sharp.
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Neither here nor there
Bill Bryson
Mr. Bryson can be a little too much too, and sometimes rather predictable. But his travels around Europe is very funny, and combining his experiences with the ones he had as a youth doing the same trip, is hilarious. Personally, I am fond of the story about the german restaurant, the incomprehensible menu and the threat of calf brain.
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Three in norway by two of them
anon
Hysterically funny, and should maybe belong under fiction for the many tall tales and absolute nonsense. But the descriptions of norway and inhabitants are spot on..

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Out of Africa
Isak Dinesen /Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke
Never mind the film. The book is beautiful, intelligent. Her view on her time in Africa very interesting, and the stories she tells vivid and touching.
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Hidden agendas
John Pilger
Well. Good old Mr. Pilger seems to repeat himself endlessly, so one book will do. He is relentless in his digging for truth, and like a dog with a bone, will not let go. Bless him.
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Those are real bullets, aren’t they?
Peter Pringle, Phillip Jacobson
There is a large pile of books on Bloody Sunday, but this is the best to my knowledge. There is a limit to how interested I am in reading about bullet entry angles over and over, when we all know what went on. They got the new inquiry, and we are still waiting to hear it.
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We wish to Inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families
Philip Gourevitch
The awful story of the genocide in Rwanda.
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Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Brilliant thoughts on time.
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Color – travels through the paintbox
Victoria Finlay
This is the book with the annoying language and irritating fancies and guesswork. But the subject is immensely interesting, and her travels to all sorts of odd places entertaining. The myths and stories well researched; the fascinating conflicts and wars fought over colours fantastic.
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The ice master
Jennifer Niven
The mad story of the polar expedition of the ship Karluk and it’s crew. It is a story of survival, cruelty and a mad scientists’ need for self-promotion, but most of all it is a story of how tragedy can split men and bring out the worst in them. The crew and scientists of the expedition survives or dies along social divides, rather than work together. Revealing and terrifying.
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The politics of nationalism and ethnicity
James G. Kellas
Interesting. Don’t think I need to say more than that.

Michael Stone – exceptionally bad haircut and not-a-winning personality – stuck his nose out again, and this is a good wan!

Michael Stone is one of those who got an early release under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement following his life sentence for a triple murder. In 1988, he launched a gun and grenade attack on the republican funeral of three IRA members shot dead by the SAS in Gibraltar. This is his claim to fame. That, plus that some of the loyalist paramillitaries didn’t want him, as they saw him as unstable

….. hello…? This is from the mentally healthy and balanced boys in UVF, UFF. Gosh, maybe there is something wrong with the guy, do you think?!

Anyway. Said fruitcake heads for Stormont, pockets filled with home made goodies, and after he is stopped, claims his actions were ‘performance art’……uuhhhh, yes. Delightful! Brilliant move of the lawyer there. The bad-haircut-guy, who killed a couple of funeral-goers, and popped up regularly with insane – no, I mean reeeally insane – points of view… well. It doesn’t bear thinking of.

The other version is what he told the police: “My intention was to walk into the debating chamber and look for where Adams, McGuinness and Sinn Fein were sitting. I would have lobbed several nail bombs to cause confusion. I planned to stab Adams and McGuinness and cut their throats.”

During interview Stone said the prominent republicans were “war criminals” and that he just “can’t handle” republicans being in government.

Brilliant – maybe lock the guy up in the Maze again, and give him some of his favourite dope. But here’s the goodies:

The lawyer said Stone – who suffers severe arthritis and walks with a stick – spent two hours working his way through the Stormont grounds to the entrance of Parliament Buildings. After being trapped by a security guard in the doors of Stormont he lit a fuse on a bag he had and threw it into the hall, shouting that it was a bomb. The device never went off and is believed to have malfunctioned after having got damp during the torrential rain that fell that day.

If that isn’t hilarious! Bless the irish weather! And see a middle age freelance loyalist nutcase hobbling through the garden and the rain, pockets bursting with hardware. Too good.

Stone said he had been acting alone telling police: “I am a dissident loyalist freelance.”

Right!

As well as the attempted murder charges, Stone is charged with possessing home-made explosives and an imitation gun with intent.

WHAT? ‘An imitation gun with intent’!? Intent to what? wave threateningly? Use the imitation gun as an imitation gun? I do not miss northern ireland-speak. “acceptable level of violence”.

He is also charged with carrying a garrotte, three knives and an axe and assaulting staff members who trapped him in the revolving doors at Stormont.

Well, well. You cannot say he came empty handed.. well equipped, but lacking one crucial thing: a plan. You know. Sneaking past the guards-kind of plan. Handeling hardware, lighting fuses, guards, ax, garrotte, knives while finding somewhere to put the cane- kind of plan.

And maybe one major blunder: maybe the guards these days are not so lenient and blind towards loyalist paras.

The security forces are not what they used to be.

___________________________________________________________________________________

the RUC are called PSNI these days.

It was all in the Patten Commission … a feeling of change, perhaps. They have a nice little website with a picture of Belfast city hall with a speeding police car going towards it, with the charming caption:

«Making Northern Ireland Safer
FOR EVERYONE
Through Professional, Progressive Policing»

yes. … well. Where do people get the idea from, that putting Capital Initials In Every Word Is A Good Idea? It Makes Everything Look Like It Should Be Abbrevated, And Especially In Northern Ireland, Where Everything Has Some Sort Of Short Form, Three-Letter Combination or Acronym. Or that putting FOR EVERYONE in capital letters does anything else but attracting unwanted attention to that phrasing?

And what exactly is “progressive” policing, if it’s not supposed to mean “fair”…?
……and Ronnie Flanagan nowhere to be seen. Strange days.

In fact, I have been sans telly for …oh.. the main part of the last sixteen years. I had a telly the first four years, I used it as a pedestal for potted plants and asian souvenirs, considered making a fish-tank out of it, and watched, hungover, all in all four hours of the good Sir David Attenborough. I had it for months before I turned it on to figure out if it was colour or black and white. The thing is: some things on telly are good. Some first class stuff. But it is surrounded by trash. So either you turn it on – default – and accidentally bump into something good,… or… I simply forgot when to turn it on for the good stuff.

It’s hard to find the news and good stories in this overwhelming pile of gossip. If you read something, and it’s not interesting or have no value a week later – it’s gossip. Trash in, trash out. Simple equation.

Yes, I see the point that if a five year old is hit by a train considering security issues would be relevant a week later. There is no argument without counter, there is no incident you cannot take far enough to mean something. Technically, philosophically.

But the thing is: it doesn’t. Actually. Means. Anything. It is Not Important.

Social pornography- we roll around in other peoples unfortunate lives, we thank the Universal Force(s) that it’s not us.I read a thing about a family whose house burned (down?) four times in a year, or something absurd like that. I think it’s supposed to make me feel enormously sorry for them. But as Oscar Wilde said: «losing one parent was understandable, but losing two just seemed careless».

Bad karma, maybe. But seriously.
The unfortunate idiots getting their picture in the paper, with baby, desperate faces, and a pile of ashes in the background, might get support and money from people overwhelmed with pity. For them, there is an incentive. For the rest of us, it’s wallowing in others’ unfortunate lives. For me, it’s a confirmation that people are idiots.

The fourth estate indeed.

These «news» take up memory on my limited hard-drive. Begone, useless stories!

We were all supposed to die of ebola/sars/bird flu and that epidemic that went on in India a few years ago… and some thing in Africa before that, whatsitsname. Most people have forgotten all about it already.
We have leaky minds.

I try to be a little selective.

The true irony? I study media production.

minor disaster
minor miracle
misanthropic humanitarian
necessary evil
recycling dump
somewhat destroyed
UN designated safe haven
vigorously ignoring
violent agreement
well-preserved ruins
Wilderness management
act naturally
friendly fire
new classic

-some are good, some not so good. All have been used in all seriousness – bless journalism.
I actually disagree with “misanthropic humanitarian” being impossible- I am one. But my favourite is “UN designated safe haven, or possibly “enforce peace”. Brilliant. In a moronic way.