This is one of the oldest characteristics in who I am, and it’s been a part of me virtually as long as I’ve been aware of the concept of politics.

Sometimes I wish that I could be ignorant and naive and believe the hogwash that politicians tell us. Sometimes I wish that I could stop thinking, and stop seeing how hollow their promises are. Sometimes I wish for the ignorance and bliss that might come with it.

But I can’t. I lost faith in politics and the people involved with it long time ago, and for each year that passes this lack of faith gets stronger.

When I went to school we were taught about democracy and parlamentarism. That the power wielded by politicians were given to them by us, the people. That this power was wielded to promote the happiness and security of the common man. That politicians worked for us, and to further to goals of peace, prosperity and safety.

Sadly this turned out to be a lie. Today the common people exist simply to promote politicians. Politicians who have long since become corrupt and lost touch with why the got into this system in the first place. Politicians who’ve become almost autocratic, and who feel that they’re above the rules. Politics have become draconian systems to keep the common man in place, and our elected politicians are ignoring our opinions in order to further their own hidden agendas. The saddest thing is that we’ve become to complacent that we stop caring, and every time there’s an election we listen to the lies and we vote in another bunch of crooks.

My own lack of faith in politics and the lack of goodness in people involved with it saddens me. But it’s nothing compared to the sadness I feel when I see how badly they country is managed, and how unabashedly the lies are thrown in our faces these last few weeks before election.

I confirmed that such a thingamabobber had indeed fallen on my balcony the previous day, but it was not yellow in color – it was purple. Yeah sure, that’s the one! Smiles all around as I quickly venture into my living room to fetch the aforementioned dohicky and return it to Daddy.

Funny though, because the doodad in question turned out to be teal in color. Neither yellow nor purple.

It’s interesting how poorly the brain seemingly remembers the color of things. This is not the first time that I’ve been mistaken about the color of some item. Interesting that we both completely mistook the color of this plastic thingamajig.

While pretending to know what the hell I was doing in the kitchen, I had some music on for companionship. One of my favorite songs is “God is a DJ” by Faithless. It’s a great dance-type song, and I never tire of listening to it.

This time however I noticed an interesting sound in the song. Faithless often uses odd bleeps, sweeps and loops in their songs, and this one sounded familiar. I’d probably noticed it before, but this time I paid attention to it. While my hands chopped various vegetables my mind stirred around and tried to remember where I’d heard that particular sound before.

After some mental wandering through my archives I remembered. It was from one of my all-time favorite movies, the masterpiece known as “Apocalypse Now“.

Apocalypse Now has a very interesting soundscape. The music is this odd synthesizer-and-percussion thing, and most of the soundscape is somewhat surreal and unreal – which goes well with the films somewhat bisarre themes. One of the more noticeable aspects of this is that a lot of the helicopter sounds have been replaced with similar-sounding (yet at the same time kind of alien) synthesizer-created sounds.

The very first minutes of the film demonstrates this, with the Huey swooping across the film with a distinctly non-Huey type sound.

It was this very sound I heard in “God is a DJ”. An odd, swooping type sound filling out the background.

I briefly wondered if Faithless had sampled it from the movie, and if so whether it was a legitimate (i.e. they asked for permission from the copyright holders) or whether it was a black-market sample. The latter option seemed much more logical, and while it’s a fairly uniquie soundbite it’s also quite generic to the untrained ear.

But then my mind continued thinking about this. What if they’d recreated the sound using the same type of equipment? What if Faithless discovered they could replicate the sound using completely different equipment?

So who owns the sound if an almost identical sound can be recreated using completely different equipment some twenty years after the “original” sound was created?

Could the copyright holders of Apocalypse decide that they owned the IP of that particular sound, and that any other sound created independently of that sound, sounds that weren’t completely identical but at the same time sounded similar enough, was in fact infringing on their intellectual property? That they owned the rights to every similar sound?

Of course it’s quite bizarre to think about, but it’s also essentially how the copyright-mafia works today so it wouldn’t really surprise me either if some crazed hollywood rights-holder unleashed a shitload of lawyers over this trivial matter.

Which in the long run reminds me that this IP-hostility only serves to stifle creativity. If Faithless had to leave out that sound due to threats of being sued into oblivion, then the rights-holder of that sound would’ve stifled innovation and creativity.

Kind of sad to think about.

(The sound in question can be heard here, in this Youtube-video of the very introduction from Apocalypse Now. It’s the very first sound heard, the swoosh-swoosh-swoosh.)

I took these photos yesterday, actually. But the weather today is the same, except a lot less windy. Yesterday it was gusting quite heavily – today it’s completely calm. Today you can feel the suns rays warming your face.

Det jobbigaste är att jag inte orkar skriva om hur jag mår, för det känns för stort, och för att jag inte längre känner att jag har orden eller orken att skriva om det samt (och det här är nästan värst av allt) att jag inte längre känner att jag litar på min egen blogg.

Det är knappt jag orkar prata om det heller, för den delen. Jag skulle behöva nån som tog hand om mitt liv åt mig, medan jag återhämtade min styrka.

Efter nio år känns det bara så tröstlöst…

Det var smärtsamt, men skönt att få bollen i rullning.

However, this last week two members of the board felt that they had the right to dictate how people decorated their patios and exteriors. The area I live in consists not only of apartment-housings, but also of duplexed houses in rows. These have exterior patios, and as with any place where people live they tend to become rather personalized and individual. People park their bikes there, decorate them individually with lights, furniture and flowers. Nothing special.

Well, apparently two of the board-members felt that the area needed a more uniform look and took it upon themselves to remove flowers, bicycles and whatever other ornamentations they felt violated the “proper” look and feel of the area. Flowers were thrown away without informing the owner of the unit it belonged to, bikes were moved away to other areas and furniture was removed without warning.

Essentially people woke up one morning to find that someone had removed their stuff. When it was found out that two members of the board had done this –with the arrogant attitude that they somehow had the right to do it– well, to call it a “shitstorm” would be quite an understatement.

I attended a meeting the other day where outraged apartment and duplex-owners asked why the board felt it stood above not just common ethics but also the law itself. The two board-members who had performed this heinous act refused to justify their actions with any response other than maintaining the attitude that the area needed a uniform look and feel to keep property values at the current (somewhat high) levels. They did not feel that they had broken any rules or laws, and maintained the opinion that people had themselves to blame for not presenting a uniform appearance outside of their homes.

When I asked if the two persons felt that they (as representatives of the board) were entitled to additionally step into our homes and start dictating how we arranged our furniture, what clothing we wore, or how we cooked our meals in order to maintain a certain “look and feel” of the community, I was met with very avoiding answers and a general stonewalling from not only the two members of the board – but from the entire board itself. Most other members of the community who attended the meeting agreed with me – where did the right to individuality and privacy end simply because the board-members felt they were entitled to arbitrarily throw peoples stuff away?

I left the meeting feeling that it was probably just a matter of time before board-members would use a master-key to enter our homes making sure we didn’t break away from the uniform look and feel they felt we should present to visitors.

—

Except of course, this never happened. I’m just feeling more and more that what’s happening in this country on (and the whole world!) is that individuality is less and less appreciated. Rather than encouraging individuality, we’re forcing people to conform to a homogeneous ideal. I simply used the concept of my housing cooperative to explore the concept.

The corporations (most obviously represented by the media-maffia) feel threatened since people now have the power to distribute their own creative works with none or very little cost. This threatens a business-model that’s built on not creating anything, but by controlling the flow of creativity from others. The Internet has rendered record companies virtually obsolete, since musicians now can distribute their own music.

Politicians feel threatened by the Internet since it allows limitless communication. No longer do we have to rely on the filtered and controlled information that they allow us through controlled outlets such as radio and television. Instead we can communicate endlessly, and with immediate reaction. Blogs and chats and direct interaction between citizens threaten to overthrow their empire of bureaucracy. This is unacceptable for them, since they want to maintain the status quo where they can use a system they control against the majority of the citizens.

Add to this mix a lot of greed and stupidity and you have a recipe for a dystopian future where the most amazing invention humankind has ever created (the Internet) is being used to control the vast majority for the benefit of a small clique of self-appointed elite.

One of the most common thing proponents of a draconian society uses is the phrase “if you’re clean you have nothing to worry about… ” which implies that if you’re a law-abiding citizen you should simply accept this invasion of privacy and loss of rights they’re trying to push on you.

Imagine a future society where everything you do is monitored. Not even George Orwell in his wildest imagination could’ve dreamt up such a horrible dystopia, and it’s all thanks to corporations and politicians corrupting the beautiful internet for their own hidden agendas.

It could start innocently enough. Think about it, virtually every computer today has a webcam – either built-in or attached through a cable. What if some politicians decided that every webcam had to be monitored via a government-installed piece of software? Just to make sure that you’re a law-abiding citizen. I mean, if you’re law-abiding you have nothing to hide, right? Just install the software and we won’t suspect you of anything. If you don’t install it, then that automatically means you have something to hide, and they will decide without informing you what kind of freak you are – even though you just wanted to maintain the right to privacy.

This is why you need to vote for your local Pirate party. If there is none, you need to start one. Before it’s too late, before commercial and political interests have corrupted our society into the one I describe above.

Before the end of May there’s the neurotic and twitchy north-swedish spring. After the end of August the slow and dull north-swedish fall takes over.

Well, it’s not all bad. September is a great month actually. Leaves turn into sparkling oranges, yellows and browns. But October is a wet and dull month, at least here in Umeå. November, the snow still hasn’t arrived in full and that means an intense and very harsh cold until the snow might finally wrap the surroundings in white.

But now it’s September. It’s been an intense summer, and while I feel a slight pang of sorrow for not doing some of the things I set out to do, I’m trying to enjoy September for what it is. It’s a cool month, literally. I try to take a walk each day, and even if they’re not always of the long variety there’s always at least an hour or two when I’m not at home.

Today is the exception.

However, that doesn’t stop my beloved cat from enjoying the balcony. Even though she’s limited to the apartment she sure does enjoy the balcony. At least once a day –if the weather is bright– she scratches the door and insists on sauntering outside to sit in one of my awful plastic chairs for a bit. Every time I imagine that if she smoked, she’d have one of those yellow french Galois-cigarettes attached to a slender mouthpiece, like some diva from the 1920s might. She’d sit out there, enjoying the fall-sun, taking in the fresh air while ignoring the irony of how she pollutes the same with her cigarette. Because that’s how cats function. They accept the paradox. Just like I imagine a 1920s style diva might accept the very same paradox.