Celebrating the Norwegian constitution

May 17th

May 17th is Constitution Day in Norway. Albeit everyone agrees that the day is to be celebrated with parades, flags and speeches, the country is fairly split about the details. Some like their sour cream porridge with sugar and cinnamon only, while others insist on having a dash of butter on it, sugar is optional and yet others prefer a hot dog.

Being a day to celebrate the constitution, which was signed during the power vaccuum between the fall of Napoleon and Norway being handed over to Sweden, gave birth to the independent kingdom of Norway. The king was imported from Denmark to secure royal blood, which means the King was Norway's first official immigrant.

The conflict

Fast forward 2013 and the 199th celebration of the Norwegian Constitution. The details are still being decided by local comitees, making it an incredibly democratic and diverse celebration. In the city of Ålesund, a school celebrates its 90th year, and want to show off the diverse roots of its students. They have already made paper flags showing the Norwegian flag on one side and their country of origin on the other side. They as the local committee if these flags may be used as an additional prop during this year's parade. The committee allows this.

From this, it doesn't take long before a right wing online paper puts up the headline "Children will be denied waving the Norwegian flag on May 17th". And representatives of anti-immigration political parties make a big deal out of the idea that "we are celebrating Norway, not the UN!" and "Celebrating with any other flag than the Norwegian flag is an incidence of misunderstood multiculturalism."

Democracy

One of the things the constitution secures is local democracy. As such, any attempts to overturn the decisions made locally on something as little as this is an insult to the same constitution that is to be celebrated. I am not and advocate of suspending democracy in order to celebrate democracy.

How Ålesund decides to celebrate the constitution is completely their own thing. I may have opinions about it, but it is their celebration, and I am more than happy to let them make their own decisions.

Inclusion

For my own part, I recall the years I celebrated national days in other countries. In the US, I felt the strong patriotism from the Americans around me, this was a celebration of the USA, it was about how it was the best country in the world. As an alien, I did not really feel welcome. I could really feel my status, not only as a guest, but as a guest whose presence was completely irrelevant. Largely, I ended up staying at home or away from people on 4th of July.

Canada was a great contrast to this. More strangers than usual spoke to me. Everyone were happy. The concept was "come, let's celebrate Canada's birthday. I don't care who you are, let's just celebrate and be happy!" I always felt welcome on 1st of July. It made me very happy about being in Canada. It made me feel proud to be a Canadian, even though I very well knew that I was not.

For "my own country", I would much rather have "guests" experience the inclusion I experienced in Canada. Did I see other flags in Canada than the Canadian? Hell yes!

The alternative

The Norwegian flag of 1814 - and it is May 17th 1814 we are celebrating, right? Looked quite different. We should possibly pull these out of our great grand parents' closets. That said, we are not even celebrating the flag or the nation as such. The day is called "constitution day" and it is the constitution we celebrate.

I therefore suggest that we all print our own copy of the consitution and celebrate by bringing it with us in the parade, where we can discuss the terminology, legal implications and loopholes. Another idea is to have fleets that visualize the various paragraphs in the constitution. We could have concerts where the constitution is used as the lyrics. There are so many constitution-things we could do.

In the end, I can only quote Bill and Ted: Be excellent to each other, and party on dudes!

Bettervision 2013: Nominees

All songs have been picked for ESC 2013. I have been tempted to go to every country's own finale to find songs that should have been picked, though I will leave that for later. For now, based on the lyrics of each song, I nominate the following countries for Bettervision 2013:

Austria, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Russia, Slovenia, Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iceland, Latvia, Romania, San Marino and Germany. Playlist:


I don't know if it is Bettervision 2012 that has had an impact, but the number of songs nominated in 2013 is higher than in 2012. The songs will now be evaluated for the following criteria:

• Law of attraction
• Musical addictiveness
• Inspiration

I noticed that many songs this year fall into one of two categories:

• Things happening in the universe as an excuse to stick with just you and me and I love you.
• Stuck with how bad things are / craving for things to become better.

I disqualified most of these songs, as they did not really show a way to a better world.

And so the snow arrives...

Suddenly, the snow came waltzing in from the ocean and dumped itself upon our land...

Checking the control of firearms

If you had told me a year ago that I would write an article about gun control, I would have thought you were insane. Alas, here I am, trying to be sane while putting together statistics that go in the face of what is considered "common knowledge" around here.

After the Sandy Hook shooting, the issue of gun control in the USA has lit up again, with all the typical arguments back and forth and people not listening to each other. And as usual, the "second amendment" side of the argument often does not see the difference between gun control and gun ban.

Also, there is a lot of pointing to the fact that tobacco is a much greater cause for death than gun violence as a reason not to do anything about gun violence. By this logic, we should also eliminate research on HIV, since tobacco tops also this.

That said, one of the main arguments of the gun control side is that the greater the gun density, the greater the homicide-by-gun-rate. One video I found on the subject made a very strange selection of countries to compare with, creating a feeling of a very biased view. So I continued searching until I found some interesting world data at the Guardian with gun ownership and gun violence rates are listed per country in the entire world.

As is typical, data is presented in a huge table made to confuse you, as you are able to digest only small portions of the data at a time. To see if there is a correlation, one needs to put it in a 2D graph. And so I did:

The USA is to the far right. Honduras is top left. One could argue that the countries with gun homicide rates above 10 are suffering from something far worse than the number of guns, and that a pattern for gun control may be found if we remove countries with civil war, lack of law, etc. So I removed all countries with a gun violence rate above 5, and got this:

I was a bit surprised to see this. There is only a slight indication that there is a correlation between gun density and gun related homicides when the homicide rate drops below 1. However, even then, it is very clear that other factors have a much greater impact on gun related homicides than the number of guns.

So if gun violence is a symptom, then gun control is a superficial treatment of  the symptom, and a sleeping pillow for those who think gun control alone is the number one factor. It does not address the real question: why do so many people want to hurt other people? What is it about society in each of these countries that make people more or less violent? If you can answer that question and implement strategies to correct the social issues, that is likely to have a much greater impact than gun control alone.

Happy new Baktun!

As I mentioned earlier, the Mesoamerican calendar ticked from 12.19.19.17.19 to 13.0.0.0.0. And as people have noticed, this did not mean the end of the world. Not too much of a surprise there, as the Mayans never did predict any end of the world. Indeed, the calendar didn't even end!

This was all made up by people who wanted to make some quick bucks, and so it is a little upsetting to see news stations now claiming that the Mayans were wrong. In one interview, a woman thought that the Mayans had purposely pulled our collective legs on this one. No, it wasn't the Mayans, it were 21st century businessmen who pulled so many legs.

Others ask if this means we have entered a new golden era. So here's my attempt at multiple approaches to figure out what the 14th baktun has in store for us.

The 14th Baktun

I say "14th Baktun" because the numbering begins at 0. So 0 is the first baktun, 1 is the second, and so on. So what does this mean? To start off with, nothing. It's a way of counting days, and there is nothing magical about it.

Skywalker to Wizard

From what I gather, different cultures had their own localized variation of the Mesoamerican calendar. Since the specific culture everyone keeps refering to is Mayan, I'll stick to that.

So, given that there are 20 baktuns in a piktun, and there are 20 gods, we could make a wild assumption that we went from the 13th to the 14th god, i.e. from the Skywalker to the Wizard.

The 392 year reign of the Skywalker, started September 18th 1618. The Skywalker is an explorer and adventurer. One could easily argue that a lot of exploration has been going on in these last 392 years, and certainly there has been a lot of adventure. (That said, the vikings belonged to the age of the fun inviting monkey, and the late middle ages were run by the human, inviting wise choices and free will.)

The Wizard, on the other hand, invites magic and the feeling of empowerment.

Tzolkin

Another way of looking at a baktun, is the energy predicted by the religious Tzolkin calendar on the first kin of the baktun. For this new baktun, the energies are as such:

The destiny of this baktun is the blue hand, healing and accomplishing. It cooperates with the yellow human, choosing wisely and with free will. The guiding force is the storm of transformation and allowing self-generation. The major challenge is red earth, being grounded and open to synchronicity. There may be the occult surprise of the white wizard, creating magic and the feeling of empowerment. All this goes to the Crystal Tone, cooperating and facilitating team work. Be aware, however, that this baktun is born during the wavespell of the yellow warrior, planning strategically and questioning.

"May the energy of the Blue Hand help me to heal in all levels and accomplish what I am looking for. I am guided by the power of Transformation. Yellow Castle. Fourth Castle of Giving. Time to use the Lessons Learned."

Sounds good to me. Because it doesn't say too much about what happens on the macro scale of things on Planet Earth. It says more about the energies available to us. After all, the macro perspective is merely a reflection of what happens within us all.

Conclusion

If the last years before the so called end of the Mayan calendar (it didn't end) has shown us anything, it is an enormous increase in the number of people who want a change for the better in this world and are willing to do something about it. This is very positive.

There is no reason to put off betterment.

Remember, therefore, that you do have free will. You are free to focus on what the world has become, and you are free to become the world you want. Must you find peace in your heart and choose wisely.

The world ends Januar 19th 2038!

Congratulations! The fact that you are reading this means that the world did not end this night, as the Mayan calendar ticked from 12.19.19.17.19 to 13.0.0.0.0. This could be because most computers do not use the Mayan calendar to keep track of time, and they do not use the number 13 to denote negative numbers.

So let me talk about something much more serious. On January 19th 2038 at 03:14:07 UTC, the 32 bit signed integer clock, the most accurate time measuring mechanism ever devised, will turn NEGATIVE! Indeed, we will be thrust back to December 13th 1901! A time when Texas was booming with oil, and right before the death of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom.

With so many bits in a computer, what prompted computer engineers to use only a 32 bit SIGNED integer to keep time? Possibly, because they figured there would never be a need to go beyond 2038. What did they know that we don't know? How does this link in to the Unix World End Prophecy? And how do you prepare youself for 2038?

So many questions, so little time to exploit the 2038 phenomenon before everyone figures out I'm pulling their leg. Look out for my future seminar: The 32 bit signed integer clock and how to elevate yourself to an unsigned integer of positivity to survive the end of the world!

Third eye