Sveinbjorn Thordarson

Þetta hér er ein fyndnasta og mesta snilld sem ég hef lengi séð. Þetta er bréf til skólaumsjónarinnar í Texas sem leggur til að ein kenning verði kennd til viðbótar við Intelligent Design og þróunarkenningu Darwins.

Dear,Good day.

I know that this mail might be a surpriseing to you but do consider it as an emergency. In a nut shell, My name Nwinyer Okpala. from the republic of Sierria-Leone in west Africa.The only child of late Dr.Solomon Okpala. I am looking for someone who can take me as a child or friend I promise to be obidient to you and I will bring happiness to your life,My late father was the managing director of Rainbow Gold and Diamond company in (KENEMA)Sierra-Leone.But he was poisoned to death alongside with my mother by his business associate, On one of their outing to discuss a business deal in oversea,However, after their death I managed to stay alone and when the war broke out in my country. I escape to near by village here,with every important files of my father.He has the sum of (US$5.2M)Five million two hundred thousand U.S Dollars only. This amount was deposited by my late father in one of the leading security company, Presently,

I am saddled with the problem of securing a trust worthy foriegn personality to help me. I will map out 15% for you.(1) you will Stand on my behalf as the beneficiary for the claim of the inheritance from the company since the management of the company adviced that I should solicit for an individual or corporate organization to claim the deposit for me as they cannot release it directly to me due to my status right now.(2)you will Help me secure my travelling documents to meet you as soon as my money is released to you.Furthermore,you can contact the company for confirmation so that the company will know that you are my partner,that will enable the company correspond with you on my behalf.I am giving you this offers as mentioned with every confidence on your acceptance to assist me or adopt me as your Child or business partner if possible and manage the money for me.

My regard to your family.
Yours sincerely.
Nwinyer Okpala.

Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List is one of the most overrated films of all time: It won seven Oscars. It is the 6th highest rated film on IMDB. The critics loved it, and the internet is flooded with reviews where people rave about being "deeply moved" or "touched" after watching it.

It's a shallow failure of a film.

What the hell is this dungfest doing in no. 6?

A good drama film needs several qualities. Of these, the most important is the exposition of characters and their interactions. Schindler's List flops spectacularly in this respect. We start out following the tale of Oskar Schindler, an opportunistic, profiteering businessman. But midpoint in the film, this Schindler persona has disappeared, and we have a new character clothed in the same flesh -- a self-sacrificing philanthropist who spends his entire amassed fortune to save the Jew workers. How did we get from one to the other? How did Schindler transform from the evil Mr. Hyde to the benevolent Dr. Jekyll? Steven Spielberg certainly doesn't show us -- maybe it happens via magic, like the bicycle ride in ET?

And what about Amon Göth, the representative Nazi? A "grotesque caricature" if there ever was one. He's an evil, sadistic, Jew-hating Nazi bastard -- but do we get to know why he wakes up every morning, takes a swig of booze and snipes Jew prisoners for fun? No. Spielberg thinks the answer is obvious -- he's a Nazi, and Nazis don't have reasons for the things they do. They're just rabid dogs out for blood, utterly devoid of any moral dimension. But this sort of shallow political correctness can't possibly cut any slack with intelligent viewers. We want to know why Göth hates the Jews so much that he fires his pistol into a pile of decimated corpses, but we never get to know. Apparently, he does it because he's an Evil Nazi, and that's all there is to it.

The attempt to add depth to Göth's character by dwelling on his twisted love affair with a Jewish girl is easily seen for what it is -- a cheap exposure of Nazi hypocrisy. How about trying to dwell on real issues here, Spielberg? How about trying to pass these people off as genuine (albeit twisted) human beings?

This shortcoming is not restricted to Spielberg. When will Hollywood own up to the fact that the men who ran the Third Reich were not mindless monsters? Some of them were cultivated intellectuals and scientists, others compassionate family men and devoted friends. Germany was the best educated country in Europe when the Nazis rose to power. The true intrigue, the true horror of the Holocaust does not lie in brutality alone, but rather in Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil". How can a man (or millions of men) arbitrarily narrow the moral sphere to exclude people seemingly no different from neighbours, friends and family? How can a man fall under the sway of a cruel and hateful racial ideology while simultaneously leading a normal, compassionate family life?

Needless to say, none of these issues are explored by Spielberg.

Another peeve of mine: Accents. There are English-speaking films and then there are German-speaking films. Schindler's List, on the other hand, does not belong to either of these categories. Instead, Spielberg opted to have the characters speak English with a German accent. Why? Listening to Liam Neeson strut about trying to sound like an Anglicised German is pathetic. Spielberg is of course trying to please Hollywood audiences by making the film more accessible to them (hence no spoken German), but for the love of God, we get the point! They're in Nazi Germany. Yes, Hitler's in charge. Yes, it's a nasty, genocidal regime. Please, no cheesy accents.

One of the truly unforgivable aspects of the film is the ending. A mildly touching speech by Schindler about being a war criminal on the run, wanted by the victors of the war, set just the right mood and would have been a perfect ending.

But no, Spielberg couldn't resist messing it up -- he had to have Schindler break down, bawl and cry, grief-stricken and lashed by pangs of conscience. Spare me the anguish, Spielberg. The grief should have been that of the Jews, not Schindler.

When Schindler took off his gold ring and blubbered "I could have saved one more", I experienced a feeling of mild revulsion. Spielberg's invariable resort to sentimentality is quintessentially American, quintessentially cheesy and quintessentially inappropriate for the subject matter of the film.

So what does this film leave us after 195 minutes of running time? Let's see:

• The Nazis were really evil
• There was a man called Schindler who didn't care about anything but money at first, and then for some reason he started to care about saving the Jews.

Brilliant, Spielberg. Positively brilliant. You really earned those Oscars, didn't you?

All of the above-mentioned flaws are bad enough -- but the way the film manipulates the viewer really takes the cake. Shots of emaciated, shaved potential Holocaust victims starving and screaming, with loud, tragic violin music to top it all off. It has been done in many films before, and will be done again. It's a grotesque form of emotional pornography.

It doesn't take skill for a film-maker to coerce the viewer into sorrow. It takes skill to produce the same feelings without resorting to cheap, melodramatic trickery. Polanski's The Pianist is a superb counter-example. A journey of the mind, a journey of understanding, of quiet and terrible suffering, is so much more satisfying than a mindless journey of the senses...

Like most of Spielberg's films, Schindler's List is technically outstanding. It captures the mood of wartime Germany perfectly. The sets, costumes and cinematography are all top-notch, and the acting is not too bad either, with a few notable exceptions. However, none of these things can overcome the fact that Spielberg is a director of extremely limited vision. His moral and intellectual depth is that of a child.

Stick to making films for children, Spielberg. Stick to making children's films. You're out of your depth.

On that note, I think it's best to end this review with Stanley Kubrick's words about Schindler's List:

Frederic Raphael [...] recalls Kubrick questioning whether a film could truly represent the Holocaust in its entirety. After Raphael mentioned Schindler’s List, Kubrick replied: “Think that’'s about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn'’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List is about 600 who don’'t.”^[1]

Ég fékk tölvupóst núna áðan, og í kjölfarið, símhringingu frá Kaliforníu. Þar ræddi ég við framkvæmdastjóra Bandarísks netfyrirtækis (sem hér verður ekki getið, en flestir þekkja það), og þróunarstjóra fyrirtækisins, og þeir létu í ljós áhuga á að ráða mig í verktakavinnu við að þróa útgáfu af hugbúnaðinum sínum.

Ég er búinn að fá leyndarsamning sentan til mín -- eftir að ég hef faxað þeim eintak með undirskrift, þá mun ég fá í hendurnar kóðann, athuga hvort ég hafi áhuga og gefa þeim svar mitt.

Mér þykir afar leitt að færa þær sorgarfregnir að hann Þorsteinn Gylfason lést í morgun.

Ekki allir gera sér grein fyrir því að það gerðist ekki fyrr en 1870.

Fyrr í ár keyrði Alþingi í gegn ill nasistalög sem gefa lögreglunni aðgang að skrám yfir GSM-síma og netnotkun landsmanna án þess að þurfa dómsúrskurð.

Skrifið undir mótmæli hér.

Alltaf frábært að heyra rök á borð við: "Íslendingar eru að verða eftir á í nútíma löggæslu, samanborið við nágrannalöndin."

Já, það er rétt. Við erum alveg hrikalega eftir á. Sú staðreynd að nágrannalönd okkar hafi keyrt í gegn evil government surveillance lög er auðvitað góð og gild ástæða fyrir því að gera slíkt hið sama. Við viljum ekki vera eftir á.

Ég heyri oft svona sófa-pólitíkusa tala um að sjálfstæðismenn hafi verið svo gríðarlega duglegir að greiða niður skuldir ríkisins. Sjaldnast geta þessir menn vísað í einhverjar konkret tölur. Staðreyndin er sú að íslenska ríkið er enn mjög skuldugt.

Úr vefriti fjármálaráðuneytisins:

Útistandandi skuldir ríkisins eru 253 milljarðar íslenskra króna, sem nema um 87% af fjárlögum ríkisins í fyrra. Greiddir vextir af þessum skuldum voru 14 milljarðar árið 2004, eða um 5% af tekjum ríkisins það árið.

Þetta er heilmikill peningur. Og jafnvel þótt þessir 67 milljarðar sem fengust frá sölu Símans færu einungis í niðurgreiðslu skulda (en það mun ekki gerast, því stór hluti af þessu er eyrnamerkt fyrir nýtt hátæknisjúkrahús -- Davíð sagði það, og verður það gert), þá sæti ríkið ennþá uppi með um 186 milljarða skuldabagga.

Hugsið um þetta svona: Með þeirri upphæð sem fer í afborganir mætti reka tvo Háskóla Íslands til viðbótar eða veita öllum 5000 glæpsamlega illa launuðu starfsmönnum ríkisspítalana %20 launahækkun.

Fólkið sem stjórnar þessu landi eru fífl.

We would like to apologize for the way in which politicians are represented in this programme. It was never our intention to imply that politicians are weak-kneed, political time-servers who are concerned more with thier personal vendettas and private power struggles than the problems of government, nor to suggest at any point that they sacrifice their credibility by denying free debate on vital matters in the mistaken impression that party unity comes before the well-being of the people they supposedly represent nor to imply at any stage that they are squabbling little toadies without an ounce of concern for the vital social problems of today. Nor indeed do we intend that viewers should consider them as crabby ulcerous little self-seeking vermin with furry legs and an excessive addiction to alcohol and certain explicity sexual practices which some people might find offensive. We are sorry if this impression has come across.

- Monty Python, Episode 32

I have just completed the final touches on Platypus, version 3.2. You can grab the zip archive right here.

Version 3.2 sports the following improvements:

• Editing of environmental variables via an interface pane
• Platypus apps can now be "loaded" with Platypus, i.e. configuration and script from the app are loaded
• Python syntax checking
• Icon can be set to a given .icns file so that smaller representations are not lost
• Command line tool bug fixed -- it now creates operational applications
• Command line tool now supports file bundling
• Info.plists in application bundles now contain LSHasLocalizedDisplayName, NSAppleScript-Enabled,CFBundleDisplayName, NSHumanReadableCopyright
• English.lproj is en.lproj in accordance with Apple's specifications
• Sliding animation when advanced options are revealed
• Fixed two small memory leaks

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.' Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. this traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.

Before advancing my own arguments for laziness, I must dispose of one which I cannot accept. Whenever a person who already has enough to live on proposes to engage in some everyday kind of job, such as school-teaching or typing, he or she is told that such conduct takes the bread out of other people's mouths, and is therefore wicked. If this argument were valid, it would only be necessary for us all to be idle in order that we should all have our mouths full of bread. What people who say such things forget is that what a man earns he usually spends, and in spending he gives employment. As long as a man spends his income, he puts just as much bread into people's mouths in spending as he takes out of other people's mouths in earning. The real villain, from this point of view, is the man who saves. If he merely puts his savings in a stocking, like the proverbial French peasant, it is obvious that they do not give employment. If he invests his savings, the matter is less obvious, and different cases arise.

One of the commonest things to do with savings is to lend them to some Government. In view of the fact that the bulk of the public expenditure of most civilized Governments consists in payment for past wars or preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a Government is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire murderers. The net result of the man's economical habits is to increase the armed forces of the State to which he lends his savings. Obviously it would be better if he spent the money, even if he spent it in drink or gambling.

But, I shall be told, the case is quite different when savings are invested in industrial enterprises. When such enterprises succeed, and produce something useful, this may be conceded. In these days, however, no one will deny that most enterprises fail. That means that a large amount of human labor, which might have been devoted to producing something that could be enjoyed, was expended on producing machines which, when produced, lay idle and did no good to anyone. The man who invests his savings in a concern that goes bankrupt is therefore injuring others as well as himself. If he spent his money, say, in giving parties for his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure, and so would all those upon whom he spent money, such as the butcher, the baker, and the bootlegger. But if he spends it (let us say) upon laying down rails for surface card in some place where surface cars turn out not to be wanted, he has diverted a mass of labor into channels where it gives pleasure to no one. Nevertheless, when he becomes poor through failure of his investment he will be regarded as a victim of undeserved misfortune, whereas the gay spendthrift, who has spent his money philanthropically, will be despised as a fool and a frivolous person.

All this is only preliminary. I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.

First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.

Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men, more respected than either of the classes of workers. There are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are idle, and I might therefore be expected to praise them. Unfortunately, their idleness is only rendered possible by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example.

From the beginning of civilization until the Industrial Revolution, a man could, as a rule, produce by hard work little more than was required for the subsistence of himself and his family, although his wife worked at least as hard as he did, and his children added their labor as soon as they were old enough to do so. The small surplus above bare necessaries was not left to those who produced it, but was appropriated by warriors and priests. In times of famine there was no surplus; the warriors and priests, however, still secured as much as at other times, with the result that many of the workers died of hunger. This system persisted in Russia until 1917 [1], and still persists in the East; in England, in spite of the Industrial Revolution, it remained in full force throughout the Napoleonic wars, and until a hundred years ago, when the new class of manufacturers acquired power. In America, the system came to an end with the Revolution, except in the South, where it persisted until the Civil War. A system which lasted so long and ended so recently has naturally left a profound impress upon men's thoughts and opinions. Much that we take for granted about the desirability of work is derived from this system, and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted to the modern world. Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

It is obvious that, in primitive communities, peasants, left to themselves, would not have parted with the slender surplus upon which the warriors and priests subsisted, but would have either produced less or consumed more. At first, sheer force compelled them to produce and part with the surplus. Gradually, however, it was found possible to induce many of them to accept an ethic according to which it was their duty to work hard, although part of their work went to support others in idleness. By this means the amount of compulsion required was lessened, and the expenses of government were diminished. To this day, 99 per cent of British wage-earners would be genuinely shocked if it were proposed that the King should not have a larger income than a working man. The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own. Of course the holders of power conceal this fact from themselves by managing to believe that their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity. Sometimes this is true; Athenian slave-owners, for instance, employed part of their leisure in making a permanent contribution to civilization which would have been impossible under a just economic system. Leisure is essential to civilization, and in former times leisure for the few was only rendered possible by the labors of the many. But their labors were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good. And with modern technique it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without injury to civilization.

Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This was made obvious during the war. At that time all the men in the armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance: borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist. The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.

This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In England, in the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: 'What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.' People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion.

Let us, for a moment, consider the ethics of work frankly, without superstition. Every human being, of necessity, consumes, in the course of his life, a certain amount of the produce of human labor. Assuming, as we may, that labor is on the whole disagreeable, it is unjust that a man should consume more than he produces. Of course he may provide services rather than commodities, like a medical man, for example; but he should provide something in return for his board and lodging. to this extent, the duty of work must be admitted, but to this extent only.

I shall not dwell upon the fact that, in all modern societies outside the USSR, many people escape even this minimum amount of work, namely all those who inherit money and all those who marry money. I do not think the fact that these people are allowed to be idle is nearly so harmful as the fact that wage-earners are expected to overwork or starve.

If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons. Oddly enough, while they wish their sons to work so hard as to have no time to be civilized, they do not mind their wives and daughters having no work at all. the snobbish admiration of uselessness, which, in an aristocratic society, extends to both sexes, is, under a plutocracy, confined to women; this, however, does not make it any more in agreement with common sense.

The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will become bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.

In the new creed which controls the government of Russia, while there is much that is very different from the traditional teaching of the West, there are some things that are quite unchanged. The attitude of the governing classes, and especially of those who conduct educational propaganda, on the subject of the dignity of labor, is almost exactly that which the governing classes of the world have always preached to what were called the 'honest poor'. Industry, sobriety, willingness to work long hours for distant advantages, even submissiveness to authority, all these reappear; moreover authority still represents the will of the Ruler of the Universe, Who, however, is now called by a new name, Dialectical Materialism.

The victory of the proletariat in Russia has some points in common with the victory of the feminists in some other countries. For ages, men had conceded the superior saintliness of women, and had consoled women for their inferiority by maintaining that saintliness is more desirable than power. At last the feminists decided that they would have both, since the pioneers among them believed all that the men had told them about the desirability of virtue, but not what they had told them about the worthlessness of political power. A similar thing has happened in Russia as regards manual work. For ages, the rich and their sycophants have written in praise of 'honest toil', have praised the simple life, have professed a religion which teaches that the poor are much more likely to go to heaven than the rich, and in general have tried to make manual workers believe that there is some special nobility about altering the position of matter in space, just as men tried to make women believe that they derived some special nobility from their sexual enslavement. In Russia, all this teaching about the excellence of manual work has been taken seriously, with the result that the manual worker is more honored than anyone else. What are, in essence, revivalist appeals are made, but not for the old purposes: they are made to secure shock workers for special tasks. Manual work is the ideal which is held before the young, and is the basis of all ethical teaching.

For the present, possibly, this is all to the good. A large country, full of natural resources, awaits development, and has has to be developed with very little use of credit. In these circumstances, hard work is necessary, and is likely to bring a great reward. But what will happen when the point has been reached where everybody could be comfortable without working long hours?

In the West, we have various ways of dealing with this problem. We have no attempt at economic justice, so that a large proportion of the total produce goes to a small minority of the population, many of whom do no work at all. Owing to the absence of any central control over production, we produce hosts of things that are not wanted. We keep a large percentage of the working population idle, because we can dispense with their labor by making the others overwork. When all these methods prove inadequate, we have a war: we cause a number of people to manufacture high explosives, and a number of others to explode them, as if we were children who had just discovered fireworks. By a combination of all these devices we manage, though with difficulty, to keep alive the notion that a great deal of severe manual work must be the lot of the average man.

In Russia, owing to more economic justice and central control over production, the problem will have to be differently solved. the rational solution would be, as soon as the necessaries and elementary comforts can be provided for all, to reduce the hours of labor gradually, allowing a popular vote to decide, at each stage, whether more leisure or more goods were to be preferred. But, having taught the supreme virtue of hard work, it is difficult to see how the authorities can aim at a paradise in which there will be much leisure and little work. It seems more likely that they will find continually fresh schemes, by which present leisure is to be sacrificed to future productivity. I read recently of an ingenious plan put forward by Russian engineers, for making the White Sea and the northern coasts of Siberia warm, by putting a dam across the Kara Sea. An admirable project, but liable to postpone proletarian comfort for a generation, while the nobility of toil is being displayed amid the ice-fields and snowstorms of the Arctic Ocean. This sort of thing, if it happens, will be the result of regarding the virtue of hard work as an end in itself, rather than as a means to a state of affairs in which it is no longer needed.

The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labor, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly clever changes that we can produce on the earth's surface. Neither of these motives makes any great appeal to the actual worker. If you ask him what he thinks the best part of his life, he is not likely to say: 'I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man's noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.' I have never heard working men say this sort of thing. They consider work, as it should be considered, a necessary means to a livelihood, and it is from their leisure that they derive whatever happiness they may enjoy.

It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. Serious-minded persons, for example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema, and telling us that it leads the young into crime. But all the work that goes to producing a cinema is respectable, because it is work, and because it brings a money profit. The notion that the desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything topsy-turvy. The butcher who provides you with meat and the baker who provides you with bread are praiseworthy, because they are making money; but when you enjoy the food they have provided, you are merely frivolous, unless you eat only to get strength for your work. Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad. Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profit-making is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.

When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours' work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently. I am not thinking mainly of the sort of things that would be considered 'highbrow'. Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which to justify its privileges. These facts greatly diminished its excellence, but in spite of this drawback it contributed nearly the whole of what we call civilization. It cultivated the arts and discovered the sciences; it wrote the books, invented the philosophies, and refined social relations. Even the liberation of the oppressed has usually been inaugurated from above. Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism.

The method of a leisure class without duties was, however, extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had to be taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptionally intelligent. The class might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers. At present, the universities are supposed to provide, in a more systematic way, what the leisure class provided accidentally and as a by-product. This is a great improvement, but it has certain drawbacks. University life is so different from life in the world at large that men who live in academic milieu tend to be unaware of the preoccupations and problems of ordinary men and women; moreover their ways of expressing themselves are usually such as to rob their opinions of the influence that they ought to have upon the general public. Another disadvantage is that in universities studies are organized, and the man who thinks of some original line of research is likely to be discouraged. Academic institutions, therefore, useful as they are, are not adequate guardians of the interests of civilization in a world where everyone outside their walls is too busy for unutilitarian pursuits.

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.

Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least one per cent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits. But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure will appear. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.

I've just released Tapir version 1.0 for Mac OS X.

Tapir is a developer tool for creating global Mac OS X status menu item applications to place in the menu bar. These status menu items can be set to execute a shell command or script and display its output when opened, or alternately, configured to run a given command periodically, displaying output in the menu title.

Interesting article in the latest Economist on the nature and history of computer gaming.

Ég skaust í Nexus í hádegishléinu í vinnunni í gær og keypti mér myndasögubækur fyrir tíu þúsund krónur. Meðal annars endurkeypti ég "Preacher: Alamo", síðustu bókina í seríunni, til að eignast aftur Preacher í heild sinni, eftir að djöfullinn hann Ísak stal henni frá mér.

Hinar bækurnar voru tvær Sin City bækurnar og fyrsta bókin af Sandman. Ég las eitthvað úr Sandman fyrir um tíu árum og var þá takmarkað impóneraður, en ég verð að segja að það sem ég hef lesið af þessu hingað til hefur reynst hið mesta eðalstöff og stórskemmtilegt. Aðalsteinn Hákonarson, I stand corrected.

From TIME Europe magazine:

What the hell do they mean by generous? What kind of misleading, manipulating corruption of meaning and context are we dealing with? Their generous welfare state? Is the welfare state suddently an independent philanthropist or benefactor, handing out doles by lordly decree?

Let us imagine that ten friends agree to pool their resources for a "health fund", which pays out if any of them is struck by illness. Let us furthermore imagine that one of them succumbs to an ailment and calls on the resources of the fund. Is the fund generous if it pays for his treatment? No, it is not. The fund is bloody well obliged to pay up, because that was the original agreement. In the same way, a welfare state isn't bloody well *generous*. It can be extensive or inextensive, existent or non-existent, efficient or inefficient, fair or unfair, but it's never generous.

This is part of the way people are manipulated by slanting words and meanings. In this context, we are to feel thankful if or when we receive this generous treatment, despite the fact that it has been paid for with honest toil and sweat. Are we, then, to go down on our knees in abject thankfulness because we receive the benefits of a social insurance policy paid for with taxes?

I am reminded of the words of Tom Ridge, head of the new Bush-instated Department of Homeland Security:

It's very kind of him and his cronies to offer the people of the United States this magnaminous gift of "liberty". Meanwhile, I'll just go back to enjoying the fact that I live in a "generous" welfare state...

Pink Floyd - 30 years and they still got the magic spell. Hérna er linkur á tónleikamyndbandið (200 MB DivX, innanlands) frá Live 8 tónleikunum í Lundúnum þar sem þeir spiluðu saman í fyrsta skipti í 20 ár núna um daginn.

Seeing as how I work on the Linux operating system all day at FRISK, I thought I'd share with you my great love of the X-Windows "graphical" interface (and I should add that I use the term loosely):

X windows:
	Youd better sit down.
	Dont laugh.  It could be YOUR thesis project.
	Why do it right when you can do it wrong?
	Live the nightmare.
	Our bugs run faster.
	When it absolutely, positively HAS to crash overnight.
	There ARE no rules.
	Youll wish we were kidding.
	Everything you never wanted in a window system.  And more.
	Dissatisfaction guaranteed.
	Theres got to be a better way.
	The next best thing to keypunching.
	Leave the thrashing to us.
	We wrote the book on core dumps.
	Even your dog wont like it.
	More than enough rope.
	Garbage at your fingertips.

Incompatibility.  Shoddiness.  Uselessness.
	X windows.

X windows:
	Accept any substitute.
	If its broke, dont fix it.
	If it aint broke, fix it.
	Form follows malfunction.
	The Cutting Edge of Obsolescence.
	The trailing edge of software technology.
	Armageddon never looked so good.
	Japans secret weapon.
	Youll envy the dead.
	Making the world safe for competing window systems.
	Let it get in YOUR way.
	The problem for your problem.
	If it starts working, well fix it.  Pronto.
	It could be worse, but itll take time.
	Simplicity made complex.
	The greatest productivity aid since typhoid.
	Flakey and built to stay that way.

One thousand monkeys.  One thousand MicroVAXes.  One thousand years.
	X windows.
                                         |
X windows:
	Something you can be ashamed of.
	30% more entropy than the leading window system.
	The first fully modular software disaster.
	Rome was destroyed in a day.
	Warn your friends about it.
	Climbing to new depths.  Sinking to new heights.
	An accident that couldnt wait to happen.
	Dont wait for the movie.
	Never use it after a big meal.
	Need we say less?
	Plumbing the depths of human incompetence.
	Itll make your day.
	Dont get frustrated without it.
	Power tools for power losers.
	A software disaster of Biblical proportions.
	Never had it.  Never will.
	The software with no visible means of support.
	More than just a generation behind.

Hindenburg.  Titanic.  Edsel.
	X windows.

Mig dreymdi afar sérkennilegan draum í nótt. Ég veit ekki hvort ég hef áfengisneyslu undanfarna daga að þakka, en þetta var alveg stórskrítið og semi-psykadelískt.

Ég var staddur í litlu, fremur þröngu rými í Bodleian Library nálægt Christ Church College í Oxford, og allir voru að bíða spenntir því Ludwig Wittgenstein var að fara að koma að halda fyrirlestur. Ég var þarna að fletta í gegnum einhverjar bækur og drekkandi kampavín á meðan fólk safnaðist á staðinn. Fyrir rest fékk ég mér sæti ásamt fólkinu. Síðan mætti loksins heimspekingurinn frægi. Hann gengur upp í pontu, ræskir sig og byrjar að tala -- og setningarnar sem hann lætur út úr sér eru setningar úr Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, númeranirnar og allt, á borð við:

"2.033: Form is the possibility of structure"

"2.04: The totality of existing states of affairs is the world"

...og svo framvegis. Eitthvað þótti mér þetta óásættanleg leið til að lesa fyrir viðstöddum, þannig að ég stend upp og gríp fram í fyrir honum. Ég segi honum að þetta óskiljanlega þvaður sé ekki mönnum bjóðandi. Wittgenstein flippar alveg og byrjar að öskra á mig, rauður í framan, viti sínu fjær.

Og svo vaknaði ég. Hmm....hvað mundi Freud lesa úr þessum?