Halfway down the Danube

Coercion

The comments thread on my post on baby sale/adoption has made me very happy -- our readers are able to politely disagree with each other, a rare feat on most blogs. Especially the comments by Raoul and Pouncer have given me food for thought and expanded my views - although I stick with my analysis of the Romanian adoption law as very stupid.

Since I trust that I can write about controversial issues without flames shooting out of my laptop, let me tell you about a disturbing law suit in Germany which has been on my mind a lot.

In September of 2002, the 11-year-old child of a wealthy Frankfurt banker is being abducted. The parents pay the one million Euro ransom but Jakob von Metzler is not freed. A suspect is quickly found but he says nothing. Four days after Jakob went missing, the situation escalates. The chief of Frankfurt police orders to threaten the suspect Magnus Gäfgen with torture unless he reveals the location of the child. The threat works, Gäfgen leads the police to the child. Jakob is dead.

This week, the chief of police who ordered and the investigator who actually carried out the threat are standing trial for coercion, and Magnus Gäfgen is the prime witness. His account of the threats is chilling. No matter the circumstance, people cannot be treated that way.

Or can they?

It took over two years for the trial to happen which shows how intrinsically complicated and painful this issue is.

Our Basic Law (our constitution) absolutely prohibits torture (and the threat of it). Article 1 states: Human dignity is inviolable, thus torture is unacceptable. But Article 1 also bases on the judeo-christian idea of the holiness of life. Jakob's life had to be saved -- but with all means?

It's up to the judges to decide what weighs stronger -- the rights of Magnus G. or the desperate attempt to save Jakob's life. It seems almost impossible to apply legal logic to a case where, as the Zeit puts it, normative aspects collide -- namely, inviolability of life and saving of life.

German jurists and publishers warn of a German Abu Ghraib. If Mr. Daschner, the chief of police, were to be acquitted -- would that break all hell loose in German police stations? (The answer is: probably not. Suspects won't be tortured, threatened or abused in Germany, no matter what the outcome of the trial. We're too much of a constitutional state.)

Politicial enfant terrible Oskar Lafontaine defended Daschner on TV and in a column in the German Bild Zeitung.

Lafontaine very consciously made his comments in a situation where the legitimisation of torture is not a theoretical issue. For weeks, not a day has passed without disclosures about the sadistic methods employed to defend “freedom and democracy” in the “war against terror.” And if torture is acceptable in the case of a kidnapping, supposedly in order to rescue a human life, it is all the more so if a large number of lives are threatened by terrorist attacks. This was the explicit argument of Jörg Schönbohm. Lafontaine’s demagogical remarks on TV follow the same logic.

But since we are a constitutional state, Mr. Daschner and officer Ortwin Ennigkeit, will very likely not be acquitted.

The Zeit finds an interesting loophole for the two policemen, though. Article 60 of the Basic Law gives the president "the right to pardon" in individual cases. The Zeit states that legally, the two men were doing wrong. But they tried to save a life. Maybe, says the Zeit, the president should execute his right in this case.

The Zeit has two more very good articles on this case, here and here. If you can read German, that is. These articles illuminate very nicely how controversial the topic is and how the heroic myth around Daschner, who was forced to decide between two horrible possibilities, is breaking apart.

Two-thirds of all Germans side with Daschner, though.

Me, I'm very torn. I can understand the anxiety, the desperation that would drive you to threaten, yes, even actually hurt someone if you think you can save a child's life with this act. Imagine it's your child. I could do worse than just telling someone I would lock him up with big black guys who would rape him.

But it's not right, and this is why we have a police, and laws, to keep order and not have anarchy. This is exactly what we have the Basic Law for -- to tell us how to behave when our instincts scream too loud for reason to be heard.

(It also seems that Daschner was actually prepared to have Magnus G. tortured, "under medical supervision". If that's the case, then he must be sentenced.)

The whole case is very sad and among the legal mantraps, one should not forget that little Jakob is dead. He was killed on the very first day of his abduction -- because he knew his abductor. Magnus G. was a friend of the family.

Election results (1)

They're still counting. But it's getting interesting.

It looks like, yep, just four parties in Parliament.

UDMR, the Hungarian minority party, came in unexpectedly strong. The internal split among the Hungarians never materialized, and UDMR took about 8% of the vote.

PRM, the obnoxious nationalist-populist "Partidul Romania Mare" (Party of Greater Romania), got about 13%. This is a drop from the 18%-19% that they got four years ago. Unfortunately, it looks like they might get into government anyhow -- see below.

The Liberal/Democrat opposition coalition, the Democratic Alliance, got about 32%. This was better than expected, and put them only a bit behind...

...PSD/PUR, the current ruling party. The PSD ("Partidul Social Democrat") and their PUR allies got about 34%. This was less than expected, and the Parliamentary vote trailed PSD presidential candidate Adrian Nastase by several percentage points.

(Non-final numbers, BTW. Votes are still being counted.)

Now, remember: parties that don't get at least 5% of the vote, don't get any seats in Parliament. (Except for a handful of seats reserved for small ethnic minorities. We'll get back to them later.)

So, although the four parties named only got about 87% of the vote, they're going to divide 100% of the seats in Parliament. Keeping that in mind, and using these numbers, we get the following distribution of power in the next Parliament:

PSD/PUR -- about 39%
Alliance -- about 37%
PRM -- about 15%
UDMR -- about 9%

If these figures hold, then we have a potentially interesting situation.

PSD/PUR plus the Hungarians will fall just short of a majority. The odious PRM plus the opposition Alliance could form a government... except that the Alliance has sworn up and down that they will never, ever ally with PRM.

So now what?

1) PSD/PUR joins with PRM. (Hawk, spit.) Possible. Not much else to say at this time, except that it would be pretty disgusting. (PRM is just creepy. Xenophobic, vaguely fascistic. Run by Ceausescu's former court poet.)

2) Minority government -- PSD plus the Hungarians, relying on the opposition's inability to unite. Possible, but probably unstable. Sure, the Alliance wouldn't govern together with PRM. But they'd probably be willing to work with PRM to bring the government down.

3) PSD goes fishing, and seeks to suck some Alliance and PRM members over to its side until it has enough for a majority. Possible, even likely. A small handful of members would be enough to tip the balance. But will take a while. Not inconsistent with (2).

4) Both sides go fishing for those ethnic minority members -- the lone Serb, the single Croat, the solitary Gypsy, etc. -- in order to squeak out a narrow majority. Unlikely but possible, and would certainly be interesting.

5) Big coalition -- PSD/PUR joins with the Alliance, or with some complete piece of the Alliance. (Remember that the Alliance is a rather rickety coalition of opposition parties, so it's not impossible that one piece of it might bolt.) Theoretically possible, but doesn't seem likely at the moment.

6) Hung Parliament -- nobody can form a majority government, and the opposition parties won't let a minority government take power. This could result in new elections. But I think this is unlikely. (The Serbs got a weird Parliament earlier this year, but they toughed it out for nearly three months until they finally managed to make it work. Sort of. Anyway, point is, hung Parliaments get talked about a lot, but are pretty rare in practice.

And then, (7) when the votes are all counted, it turns out that PSD/PUR + UDMR has a narrow majority after all. Still possible. And if this happens, then I'd expect the new government to stabilize pretty quickly -- Romanian legislators have a long history of abandoning their parties to join the majority in power.

Did I mention the Presidential election? Nastase led the pack, but Basescu was just a few percentage points behind -- 39% to 34%. (PRM perpetual candidate Vadim Tudor got about 12%). So there will be a runoff in two weeks.

Most of us were thinking that the Presidential race would be largely symbolic, because the Presidency of Romania is pretty much a symbolic office. But one if the President's powers is to decide who gets the first chance to form a government. And when a Parliament is very closely balanced, that can make all the difference.

Two additional complicating wrinkles: (1) Parliament has two houses, which have slightly different vote totals. Let's not even discuss this now. (2) Accusations of vote fraud, which are already flying. These seem to be retail rather than wholesale -- lots of local skullduggery rather than massive nationwide theft -- but the election is close enough that, yah, they could make a difference. The OSCE monitored the election, and is expected to have a report out soon.

More in a bit.

A Mestrovic in Bucharest

That was unexpected.

See, Bucharest is a good-sized city. So even after a year and a half, there are still some corners I haven't turned. On Friday I turned one, on the corner of Bulevardul Dacia and Strada Henri Coanda.

There's a little museum there, the Museum of Romanian Literature. I've always wondered what would be in a museum of literature -- old books? Statues of authors? -- but I've never found the time to go in. I crossed the street, and turned right instead of left...

...and there it was: the Mestrovic.

Okay: if you're not a fan of 20th century sculpture, you might not know Ivan Mestrovic. I wasn't myself, until I moved to the Balkans. Short version: he was certainly one of the greatest sculptors of the last 100 years, and there are some people who will argue that he was the greatest. Certainly he's the greatest sculptor ever to come out of the Balkans.

Mestrovic left pieces of his work all over the former Yugoslavia. I first had the delight of discovering them in Belgrade, and then found several more when we visited Zagreb. Even the mediocre ones are good, and the good ones are fantastic.

But I'd had no idea there was a Mestrovic piece here in Bucharest. And a big one, too.

It was a sculpture of Bratianu the Younger. Who he was... that's a whole post in its own right. In brief, he was the most influential politician in early 20th century Romania. Up until the First World War he was the country's great liberal leader. After that, well, the disaster of Romania's defeat in 1916 seems to have unhinged him a little. Long story.

But there was this little park, on the south side of Bulevardul Dacia, just a hundred meters or so from Strada Victorei. (Okay, if you're not from Bucharest, this is right in the center of the city. The American Embassy, the Hilton Hotel and the Goethe Institute are all within a few minutes walk.) And this little park, maybe thirty or forty meters on a side, had obviously been designed as a setting for the Mestrovic. In the center, set just a little back from the street, Bratianu sat on his stone seat, head tilted a little, watching the world go by.

It was a good Mestrovic. He'd caught the man's intelligence and energy, but also his neurotic sensitivity and vanity. The limbs were twisted in a way that subtly suggested the contortions of a mind perpetually at war with itself. The tilt of the head looked statesmanlike from one angle, but walk a step or two and you saw a great ego looking down its nose at you. The brow was furrowed, the eyes were looking within. A good Mestrovic, maybe a great Mestrovic...

...and it was trashed. The stone chair was covered with graffiti, as were the great stone legs. Several fingers had been chipped off. The little park had no benches, no flower gardens, no fountains; it was surrounded by crumbling, ugly houses, defaced by graffitti and garbage. There were no mothers with toddlers, no chess-playing old people, no teenagers with skateboards. The park had become a place for dogs to crap in. And nobody, it was clear, gave a damn about the Mestrovic.

Okay, there are much worse things going on in Bucharest than a neglected statue, however fine. Poverty, human misery, lives bent and broken by misgovernment in a hundred different ways. (See Claudia's last post, for instance.)

Still... it's like spitting on a Rembrandt. Just not something you expect to see in a civilized place.

For sale

We've blogged about the Romanian treatment of the orphan and street kid problem, the EU reaction and the Romanian response to that before.

Sky TV, a British TV station, showed a report last week that stirred some blood here. A team of reporters with pocketsful of Euros grazed the poorer areas of Bucharest, trying to buy babies.

Did they succeed?

You bet they did.

Sky News' Lawrence Lee reports:

It proved remarkably simple to buy a baby. You go to the outdoor market in Bucharest, and look for the poorest people, who, inevitably, are laden with young children.

You pretend to be a couple desperate to adopt; in the space of a single afternoon we met one man who offered us whichever of his daughter's 20-or-so children we wanted; another offered us his wife's unborn child for 500 euros (£350).

Not only does this seem to raise grave questions about Romania's suitability to be a part of the EU, it also causes a huge headache for the agencies who continue to fight a losing battle against gangs engaged in people trafficking.

This comes as no surprise to people living in Romania. The recent changes in the adoption law -- namely, that foreigners are only allowed to adopt if it's proven that no Romanian wants a specific child -- have not improved the situation. It's a remarkably stupid law in the first place, and then, of course, it's not enforced consistently. Money will buy you anything, also the cooperation of an official.

Speaking of enforcement: how do you think the authorities reacted to the Sky News report?

They are now seeking the families who offered their children for sale in order to prosecute them. The National Authority for Child Protection and Adoption is helping the Department against Organized Crime and Drugs [sic!] which is conducting the investigation.

Where is the Child Protection service when those children end up on the street because their parents cannot feed them anymore? Why the Police Department against Organized Crime? What is anybody doing against the roots of the problem?

Sky News:

The Mayor of Bucharest, a forward-looking man who's one of the few here prepared to admit that big problems still exist, was apoplectic.

"You wouldn't treat a dog like this," he said, and he was obviously right. "But what to do?" He reckoned it was about education, but in truth many Romanians regard the Roma as an internal cancer, keeping their country in the middle ages.

This is true, I'm sorry to say.

Last night the monsters came...

... to our house and ate all the pacifiers.

Daddy beat the monsters with a stick, so they won't ever come back. But - we couldn't save the nu-nu's. (Pronounce "noo-noo".) The monsters ate them all. Not a single one in the entire house.

We got through the day all right. Pockets of screaming in the morning, mainly David, who doesn't understand the thing with the monsters but can say "nu-nu". We took the kids to the German-French Christmas bazaar in the morning where we bought a lovely wooden working bench for the boys for Christmas.

Then we went to the Village Museum to let them run around and wear themselves out.

That went well. David screamed some more in the car before falling asleep, but did fall asleep. Alan mumbled a lot about monsters (no, he's not afraid, he's just indignant) but napped for over two hours.

Now: bedtime. Things went well through the evening routine of bath, bottle, books. Now they are singing -- ABC-song; Twinkle, twinkle, little star; Meatball song. Alan is singing too -- that's a relatively new thing. He sings a lot in nursery school and now, that his mouth is free in bed, he joins in with his Dad.

It's nine in the evening and they are not sleeping yet. Watch this space.

Update: A few moments ago, Alan was talking to himself in bed. (He does that a lot.)

And I heard him say, "No monster eat my pillow!"

So I went inside and explained that I, Daddy, had hit the monster hard with a stick. And that the monster had run away very fast, and that it wouldn't be coming back. So that his pillow was safe. No monster would, no monster ever could, eat his pillow.

Okay?

A thoughtful pause.

"Okay."

Quiet now for the moment.

Update II. Quiet. They are sleeping, and without too much fussing.

We're waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Behold!

I used to live in Orlando, once. My parents-in-law live close by. Somehow, I'm not all that surprised to see that something like this made its first appearance here.

Google Scholar

These past days, Google has launched the beta version of Google Scholar. It lets you "search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research." (About Google Scholar)

I tried it out by searching for papers by my brother, who's an authority on cosmic ray air showers. The search string "Drescher Cosmic" brings his papers up nicely. It does not list his homepage, since that isn't regarded as a scholarly article. That's arguably correct. The string "Cosmic Ray Air Shower", however, pops up his paper "Cosmic ray air shower characteristics in the framework of the parton based Gribov-Regge model NEXUS" only on the second page, as number 12. Even without the quotes, it should be further up. Google Simplu, as we in Romania would say, pops up his webpage but not the papers. So it works, eh?

But there is some criticism in the scholarly world. German readers can find more about that in this article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Some problems are simply teething pains -- like googling for "Aristotle" will get you a bunch of molecular papers by Aristotle Arapostathis, instead of something by, well, Aristotle.

A bigger problem is that articles are not sorted chronologically. On the first page of hits for "cosmic ray air shower" is an article from 1963. It stands to reason that it may be a bit outdated. However, Google says that a feature that will let you sort by date will come soon.

Another problem is that the top hits often lead to subscription magazines or papers. Until now, papers and articles in password protected areas could not be spidered and therefore were practically non-existent to those working online with search engines. Google is working with publishers to remedy this -- which is a mixed blessing. Suddenly, researches can locate articles which had been "invisible" before, which is great. But then they find that they are required to subscribe, register and/or pay a fee to view the article. Sometimes, those fees are quite high and it can be frustrating to click on countless links, only to discover that once again, someone wants you to pay. A feature that would let you search for articles in order of accessibility would be nifty, but I'm not sure how doable that is.

Duane Webster, head of the Association of Research Libraries, criticizes that Google has not made public "how it determines what is scholarly". Well, OK. (That seems a very scholarly critique, if I might say so. I like scholars but they can be a bit anal.)

Another often criticized factor is the citation feature.

The new search service also provides citation information about the articles retrieved by stating how often a paper has been cited in scholarly literature, Google said. But the company conceded that "your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications."

Nor is it entirely clear yet how the citation ranks given by Google relate to those on more established services. "I think [the citations are] a potentially very valuable tool," said Tim Mark, the executive director of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. However, "I think the research community needs to test drive [Google Scholar] for a while," [..].

All in all, I think that Google Scholar is a great tool. It's only a beta version at the moment, so many of the above mentioned problems will be solved when the final version is launched. I say, good work, Google!

Peace on Earth

Sometimes, they nap together. Oh, blissful silence.

Chip, chip, chip...

It's amazing how many people have not heard about the bill that passed Congress last week. Hidden inside is a provision that bars federal, state or local agencies from forcing doctors, hospitals, insurers, HMOs or other health care entities to provide abortion services or referrals.

So, imagine you're a rape victim. You are horrified to find that you carry the attacker's child, and go to a clinic. You see a doctor and he says "No, we morally object to abortions."

Where can I go instead? "I don't have to tell you that, so I won't."

But what can I do? "Well, I can give you the address of this pro-life organization. They're good people, and I'm sure they'll help you do the right thing!"

On another front, more and more doctors refuse to prescribe the Pill, and more and more pharmacists refuse to fill prescriptions.

Chip, chip, chip away at people's rights.

Elections, briefly

I hardly blogged at all for a month. So there hasn't been much about the Romanian elections. Now they're just two days away, so there's not much left to say.

Here's the simple version. There are Parliamentary elections and then there's also a Presidential election, which is separate. Romania has a "French" parliamentary system, which means it has both a President and a Prime Minister. It could possibly happen that one party might gain a majority in Parliament -- which would allow them to choose the Prime Minister -- while another party elects the President.

The Parliamentary elections will be all done by Sunday night. The Presidential election will only finish if one candidate wins 50% -- unlikely, since there are 12 candidates in the race. More probably, it will go to a runoff election between the two strongest candidates, two weeks later.

Some brief details follow.

Romania has a lot of political parties, but here are the ones that may play a real role in the election.

PSD/PUR -- PSD, the Partidul Social Democrat, is the 400 pound gorilla of Romanian politics. It's mostly ex-Communists. You could call it a center-left party, but really it's a bunch of corrupt but pragmatic would-be populists.

PSD controls the Parliament, with an overwhelming majority in both houses. The Prime Minister, Adrian Nastase, is PSD. So is the President, Ion Iliescu. (Officially the President shouldn't be a member of any party, and officially Iliescu isn't, but really, he doesn't even bother to pretend any more.)

PSD should be in a strong position. The economy has grown rapidly in the last four years. Romania has joined NATO, and is inching closer and closer to EU membership. Most of Romania's business elite support them. And, of course, they control or strongly influence more than half of Romania's major TV and radio stations and newspapers.

But a lot of people have come to associate PSD with rampant corruption. And in the municipal elections last June, they got spanked. So, just to make sure, they allied themselves with PUR, the Humanist Party of Romania. (We blogged about PUR a while back.) PUR consistently picks up about 5% of the vote, and -- better yet -- it has a big pile of money plus a TV station and a newspaper. So PUR and PSD have formed a coalition.

(Random prediction: if PSD wins big, they'll kick PUR out again within a year. Maybe less. They did it once before.)

PSD is very popular in rural areas, especially in "Old Romania" -- the south and east of the country. Not so popular in cities or in Transylvania.

The current guess is that PSD/PUR will win the biggest block of seats in Parliament. The big question is whether they'll win a clear majority. Meanwhile, for the Presidency, they're running Prime Minister Adrian Nastase. (Nastase might have preferred to stay as Prime Minister, but I'm not even going to begin discussing the complicated backstory there. This is what I get for taking a month off. Sorry. If any of our Romanian readers want to fill in the blank spots, please go right ahead.)

The Democratic Alliance (D.A.) -- Composed of two parties, the Democrats and the Liberals. Also a sort of center-left party composed of former Communists. Though "left" and "right" in the US or Western European sense don't map so well onto Romanian politics right now.

The D.A. is more a collection of factions than a party, or even an alliance of parties. Basically it's all the political have-nots, including a lot of people from the previous (1996-2000) government. Since that government wasn't too popular, this is a problem.

The D.A. isn't very clear on what it's for, but they know what they're against: Adrian Nastase, and corruption. (They also don't much like President Ion Iliescu, but since he's still pretty popular, they're more quiet about that.) As noted, a lot of people associate PSD with corruption, so the Alliance is hammering this theme hard.

The Alliance's biggest electoral asset is probably its presidential candidate: Bucharest Mayor Traian Basescu. Basescu is a former naval officer who's done a not-completely-horrible job of running the (notoriously difficult to govern) city of Bucharest. He's very popular in cities and, for some reason, with educated people and liberals. (Which is odd because he's a rough, plain-spoken sort of fellow, and no liberal himself.)

Best guess is that the Alliance will win the second biggest block of seats. If PSD gets a bigger block, but doesn't win enough to form a government, watch for internal stresses as PSD tries to seduce Alliance factions away.

PRM, Partidul Romania Mare, the Party of Greater Romania -- This is the populist, asshole nationalist party. They're rather like Le Pen in France, or the Serbian Radical Party over in Serbia. The leader of the party is a fellow named Vadim Tudor, who used to be Ceausescu's court poet. (Really.)

PRM was a major player in the 2000 elections. It seems to have been weakened in recent years, though. This is partly by erratic behavior on Tudor's part (he used to be an anti-Semite, now he's a philo-Semite); partly by the other parties stealing their best lines; and partly by economic good times, which are always bad for radical populists. They're expected to get around 12-14% of the vote, down from about 19% in the last election.

This is still enough to give them a lot of seats in Parliament, though, and to make them a possible member in a coalition government. The Democratic Alliance has said they will never, ever join a government with PRM, but the PSD folks seem to be leaving the door open a crack.

Vadim Tudor has directed most of his campaign attacks on Basescu and the Alliance. This has caused a lot of people to think that either (1) he's currying favor with PSD in the hope of forming a coalition with them in the next Parliament, or (2) he's already been bought by them, and is really Iliescu's attack dog.

UDMR, the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania -- This is the Hungarian party. It used to be the only Hungarian party. Now it's not. This is bad, because a party needs at least 5% of the vote to get into Parliament. So, if a small party wins 8% of the vote, they get 8% of the seats. (Or actually a bit more.) But if that small party splits into two smaller parties that get 4% each, nobody gets anything. Since UDMR traditionally gets 6%-8% of the vote, this is a concern for them.

The UDMR story is long and baroquely complex, and involves cross-border interactions with Hungarian politics in Hungary, but that's the gist of it: they have to overcome an internal rebellion. If they do, they'll be in. Otherwise, maybe not. If they're not, it will do some odd things to the composition of Parliament, and may also make the Hungarian minority very nervous.

UDMR has historically been pragmatically opportunist -- they allied with the old government, then promptly switched sides to work with PSD after the 2000 elections. They've already made it clear they'll join whatever party or coalition has a majority.

There are a couple of smaller parties that are hoping to break the 5% barrier, but leave those be for now.

Best guess at the moment: PSD will dominate Parliament, but with a reduced majority. This would force them to invite someone else into coalition. The candidates would be (1) UDMR, if they survive; (2) various pieces of the Alliance, if they can be picked apart; or (3) PRM. That last one is pretty repugnant, though.

Meanwhile the Presidential campaign will come down to a close race between Nastase and Basescu. My money is on Nastase, if only because he has a lot more resources behind him.

As I said, it's a brief summary. Comments from Romanian readers are very welcome.

The Trans-Fagaras Highway (1)

We drove over the Trans-Fagaras Highway, way back in August. We posted one picture and then said that a more detailed post would have to wait "a few hours".

Three months later: let's talk a little about the Trans-Fagaras Highway.

The TFH was another one of Ceausescu's big, insane projects. While it's not as big as the Palace of the People, the Calarasi steel works, or the Danube-Black Sea Canal, there's a sense in which it surpasses them all: it's probably the most purely and completely insane.

The canal made some sort of sense. The Calarasi steel works at least made steel. Even the Palace of the People, though it will never be worth the titanic cost of its construction or the mayhem it caused, serves some function today.

But the TFH is purely and completely useless.

It's a highway that goes -- I am in no way exaggerating -- from nowhere, to nowhere. And in order to do this, it goes straight up the side of a fairly large mountain. It cost an estimated $50 million to build, and at least 30 people died during the construction. Many more have died in accidents -- it's not safe, at all. And it's closed more than half of the year, from September to May.

So what's it like?

Well... start with the mountains. We all know what Romania looks like, right? An oval, slightly flattened, with the Carpathian mountains cutting across the country in a backwards "L".

So, the bottom of that "L" is a mountain range, going from east to west. Not counting some foothills and whatnot, it's about 200 miles long. And that mountain range has only three good passes in it: two south of Brasov (going to Ploesti and Pitesti, respectively), and then the spectacular valley of the Olt, south of Sibiu.

Between the Brasov-Pitesti pass and the Olt valley, there's no natural pass through the mountains. That's the Fagaras range. It's about 50 miles/80 km long, and it's just a solid wall of stone. It rises about 2200 meters to its long, snaky crest, punctuated only by the occasional dramatic peak rising even higher. The southern side of this wall is somewhat eroded and slopes away... I won't say gently, but reasonably. The north face, however, is damn near vertical.

About a third of the way from the Olt Valley to Brasov, though, there's a spot where the north face falls into some confusion. The mountain wall kinks, just a little. It's still almost vertical, but a tangle of small streams have carved deep valleys, making a weird knot of chasms and ridges. So you could, if you were willing to spend a lot of money, run a road up there.

There wouldn't be any reason to do that, of course. Yah, the mountains are an obstacle, but it's not like you can't go around. North of the mountains, between Sibiu and Brasov, is... well, nothing much. Farm country; the dusty southern edge of the Transylvanian Plateau. Some corn, some cows, some sheep. No large towns. South of the mountains is... well, nothing at all. Some forest, and a big hydroelectric reservoir.

But still, at that one point, you could build a road. It would switch back and forth and back and forth, and there would be bridges every few hundred meters -- really scary bridges, with sheer drops on one side and, like, much bigger empty air terrifying sheer drops on the other -- and then those would alternate with tunnels and with alarming-looking cuts where thousands of tons of rock were very crudely blasted out of the mountain. It would skip from ridge, over chasm, and to ridge again like a mountain goat, zigging and zagging as it rose towards the crest. It would be expensive and it would be dangerous and it would be completely pointless, but you could do it.

If you had a country at your disposal, and no restrictions but your own sovereign whim.

(More in a bit.)

The monster exposed

All last week, David was really crabby. He ran a low-grade fever but that in itself was not enough to justify not sleeping at night (for hours!), screaming (for hours!), and being extremely fragile (all the time!). Look at him the wrong way and he'd sob and throw a tantrum. He's got stamina, that kid. His tantrums last. For hours. He also got really picky about eating. Mostly, he threw the food down on the floor or flung it into a corner, in disgust.

My sweet-tempered baby boy had turned into a monster toddler that I wasn't entirely sure I liked, at all.

Then yesterday, we noticed blisters in his mouth.
This morning, the blisters were also on his palms, his soles, and his butt. In profusion. Big fat rash with fluid-filled blisters.

My first reaction was horror (my poor baby!), then relief (oh, he's not a monster, he's just sick!), and then guilt (oh, I hated him for being such a monster and all the time he was sick! I'm a bad mother!).

Sigh. Hand-foot-and-mouth-disease (HFMD) has been going around at Alan's nursery school. Maybe Alan had a subclinical case, since he never showed any signs. OTOH, we were busy keeping David from screaming (for hours!) and Alan has a high tolerance for pain and malaise. Or he will get it next. Oh, joy!

We have invited eight adults and four kids over for Thanksgiving later today. All yesterday was a frenzy of preparation. We organised a butterball turkey via the Embassy (don't tell them!). The menu includes apple-cranberry-currant sauce, asparagus and mushrooms in balsamic vinegar, turkey with all the trimmings, mashed potatoes, squash puree, corn on the cob, salad with avocado, feta and peppers, two kinds of pies...

I just got off a round of conference calls to determine whether it is sensible to have the dinner at all, what with David being infectious. Our guests unilaterally decided to brave the virus and eat the turkey -- the kids all go to INS, so they were probably already exposed. Also, they all had contact with David in the past 5 days, when he was already contagious.

Well.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Ukraine, briefly

Wild stuff is happening in the Ukraine right now.

You can find an overview, updated a couple of times per day, over at A Fistful of Euros. Some good Ukrainian blogs are also posting on this, more or less live: Neeka's Backlog (in English), Abdymak (mixed English and Ukrainian -- if you can't understand it, scroll down a bit) and Obdymok.

Slow-motion revolution, exercise in political futility, or prelude to big trouble? Too soon to tell -- but I have to say, it's really, really hard to see how Vladimir Putin can allow this to go forward. Last year Georgia, this year Ukraine... the progression is a little too obvious. Scary stuff, if you're sitting in the Kremlin. So, I'm finding it hard to be optimistic.

Not too many Romanians seem interested, BTW. Ukraine is Romania's largest neighbor, but events there don't seem to have captured the popular imagination. (Any of our Romanian readers care to comment on this?)

Belgrade to Timisoara

Last week I took the train from Belgrade to Timisoara.

Belgrade is a city of more than a million people; it's the former capital of Yugoslavia, and still the capital of Serbia and Montenegro. Timisoara is the largest city in western Romania, about half a million people.

Timisoara is the nearest large city to Belgrade, and vice versa. The two cities are just 175 kilometers apart... about 110 miles, for Americans.

The train ride takes five hours and fifteen minutes.

It's not that it's a local train. It makes exactly two stops (Pancevo and Vrsac, if you must know).

It's not the terrain. Flat as a pancake, all the way. It's the Banat, which is sort of like the Iowa of the Balkans.

It's not the border. The border takes an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Annoying, but that still leaves something like four hours to cover 170 km. You could do that on a bicycle.

So why?

Well, part of the reason seems to be that the Serbian train system is hurting. It got messed up badly by the breakup of Yugoslavia, and then badly damaged by the NATO bombing. Apparently there are exactly two (2) locomotives available on the Belgrade - Vrsac line. One pulls passengers, the other freight.

Okay; but that can't be the whole story. The NATO bombing was five and a half years ago, and most of the damage has been repaired. Locomotives are not that expensive.

I really don't know the answer. But it does make for an interesting ride.

Coming out of Belgrade is the nice part. The train backs out of the station, waits a few minutes for switches to be thrown, then chugs slowly out of the yards and along the Sava river. You go under all the bridges. Past the Sava docks and the floating restaurants. Around to the confluence with the Danube, under the shadow of Kalamegdan hill and the old Turkish fortress. You leave in late afternoon, so the sun is setting on the other side of the river. Finally you go slowly over the big railroad bridge north of town. Pop open your window and you can stare 20 meters down into the brown water of the Danube. It's nice.

After that, though... well, it gets long. You crawl into Pancevo. Stop for no apparent reason. Move another kilometer or two. Stop again. Crawl forward to the station. Stop; wait for twenty minutes or more, while perhaps a dozen people get on and off. By this time over an hour has passed. Darkness is falling, but you can still see the lights of Belgrade just a few miles to the south.

Eventually you leave Pancevo and proceed, very slowly, to Vrsac. Maybe 100 km? That's another hour and a half.

-- Vrshac is actually a very nice small city. (It's pronounced VUR-shots, by the way. If you can trill the "r" just a little, you've got it.) Completely neglected; nobody ever seems to go there. But it's got one of those Austro-Hungarian town centers with the nice big plaza surrounded by churches and nice architecture. Also a pedestrian mall, with some decent-looking shops. A war memorial that was pretty obviously originally dedicated to the Hungarian dead of WWI, but now has a big blank spot at the base.

Vrsac sits under a mountain that's actually the farthest south-west corner of the Carpathians, where a spur juts out from the mass of the mountain range to poke a few miles into the Banat. Very dramatic, and I understand there are some fantastic views from the top. Just approaching on the train, it's something to see: a single lonely mountain rising majestically from the plain, with the town curled around its base.

But you can't visit Vrsac by train. Oh, you can, but it's not a good idea. For one thing, there are only two passenger trains per day -- the one I was on, and another one coming back around 6 in the morning. For another, the train station is inexplicably located, not in the center of town, but nearly two miles outside of it. Down a bleak road lined with closed factories that's not lit very well at night. Go figure.

So, the train sits at Vrsac for another half hour or so. And then it takes off north across the Banat. And it actually starts to pick up some speed. 40 miles per hour! 45! Zooming through the night, the dark plains flowing past outside your window...

...and then you reach the border, and get to sit for another hour or more while they check your papers.

The train leaves Belgrade at 3:45 in the afternoon. When you do eventually arrive in Timisoara -- again, just over 100 miles away -- it's 10:00 pm: five hours and fifteen minutes of travel, plus an hour of time difference.

Ah, well. One day they'll get a proper train, and the trip will take just two hours or so. But until then, it's still a trip worth making. Just bring a good book or a good friend, and a pack some sandwiches.

Dawn

The boys got us up before 6:30 this morning. David first, as per usual. Then Alan a few minutes later.

When I come to get Alan, he stands up in his crib and raises his arms. He's two and a half, but tall for his age. I bend down and pick him up. He looks around: is Mommy in the room? No. He puts his arms around my neck and lays his head on my shoulder. Sighs a little: what can you do.

Going down the stairs, I paused to look out the window. The sky was still black, but just starting to go gray in the east. Two planets were shining brightly: Venus, low above an apartment block; Jupiter, a couple of handspans higher up the sky. Leaning forward to look at them, I could feel the cold coming off the glass. Outside, the puddles on the street had turned to white ice.

Half an hour later -- bottle, cuddle, diaper change -- I went back up the stairs, and paused at the window again. Now the whole sky was pale gray going to blue. The night was over, but the sun had not yet risen. I looked for Venus, looked again, and finally found it, fading to the edge of vision against the brightening sky.

In the tree across the street, three doves sat in a diagonal line, tic-tac-toe. They were motionless, heads sunk, round balls of feathers puffed against the chill. It had been a long, cold night, and it wasn't quite over yet.

There were things to do -- there are always things to do, in the mornings. But I stood at the window for a minute or two more, until an upper corner of one gray apartment block suddenly flamed into gold.

Quote of the Day

If things here will work like in Romania or Bulgaria, we can be quite content. After all, this is the Balkans.

Paddy Ashdown, High Representative, about expectations of a model democracy in Bosnia

Staatsangehörigkeitsbeibehaltungsantrag

Naw. It's not really a German word. It's actually a "Antrag auf Beibehaltung der deutschen Staatsbürgerschaft" -- a petition to keep your German citizenship.

German law doesn't recognize dual citizenship as a rule. There are exceptions -- if you're born with two citizenships (like my boys), then it's mostly OK. But if you want to acquire the citizenship of another country any day later than your birth day, you have a problem. The reasoning is that if you go and apply for another citizenship, you obviously want to get the hell out of Germany and live somewhere else. So you might as well lock the door when you step out. It makes a certain amount of sense. I mean, can you please make up your mind who you want to be?

Since the world isn't all black and white, though, there is a back door. You may apply to keep your German citizenship while obtaining a foreign citizenship, and in some cases this application is even approved. It's not easy, though, and you have to make a good case for yourself.

This is how it works. First, you download the form and fill it out. You have to proof you're German before you can apply to continue being German, if you get my gist.

Then the document asks for your ties to Germany - whether you have relatives, business connections, property or insurance claims. And last, you have as much space as necessary to list your reasons for a. wanting to keep the German citizenship and b. pursuing another citizenship. That's the crucial part.

What to write?

A. I'm German and always will be German, no matter what passport I carry. I'm horrified by the idea one day I will not be able to walk through the "EU" border line anymore, or that I can't just go and live in Germany indefinitely if I please to do so. I teach my boys to speak German and we have the Christmas presents on Christmas Eve. Half of the boys' toys live in my parents' house. We visit them regularly. Our life insurances run on our German address. I really only want the US citizenship if I can keep my German citizenship.

B. I really only want the US citizenship to get out of the claws of the USCIS, formerly known as INS. I've had one, repeat ONE, good experience with them, all other experiences were nasty to really, really horrible. I want to be able to live in the US with my family without my fearing that I'll be shown the door at the slightest misdemeanor.

Oh. And I want to vote in both countries. Either country can be the future for my boys and I feel the need to do my best to ensure it's a good future.

It's as simple as that: We are a US-German family. We have ties in both countries and we want to be able to live in both countries without being pestered by officials of either color. Doug has an Irish passport, which with Ireland being EU, makes it equally easy for him to live in Germany or in the US. He can even vote in Germany. I want to have the same right.

What do you think? Am I making a good case for my cause?

Ugh, says the Turk in me

I grew up in Turkey, did you know that? It's the secret Muslim in me -- or the respectful UU -- who cringes at this picture. Cringe is not too strong a word. It really upsets me. And if it upsets me, how will the effect of this behavior be on, oh, a Muslim?

It's just basic respect for another culture and another religion. Is it really too much to ask for?

Seems like.

Introducing... Paul!

For the longest time, I wanted to write a post about a member of our family -- Paul. He is very special and he illustrates our liberal views in this household. Not only do we endorse gay marriage, not only did we use to live in Dupont Circle, no! We also share our quarters with Paul.

Paul came to us back in spring 2003. It was before David was born and we thought it would be nice for Alan to learn how to care for someone else, share his toys, and his parents' love and attention. Paul has beautiful blue eyes but no hair. First, we thought this was a lifestyle choice, now we're not so sure. See, he came into this house dressed up as a boy. His name was Paul. No problems, right? It was not until much later that we realized Paul was indeed, physically, a girl. He does, however, insist on being called "Paul" and referred to as a male. He also never thought to put his clothes back on once he'd got rid of them. He's a true nudist if there ever was one.

What can you do? We tolerate his quirks and teach our boys to be open-minded in general and unassuming about people's sexual self-perception in particular. It is an important lesson, no doubt about that. We just sometimes wished we had been informed about his gender confusion before Paul made our house his home. Just, you know, to be prepared.

Anyhow. Here's a picture of him. And no, he never smiles.

Sunday at Herastrau

We spend almost every Sunday at Herastrau park. Herastrau is a very big park, in the north of Bucharest, on the shores of Herastrau lake. It sports restaurants, boat rentals, various playgrounds, a car race track for minicars, and more. It's immensely popular and even on bad weather days there is a crowd. We are, of course, going there for two reasons: the playground, and the trampoline.

It was very muddy, that's why the boys were wearing their mud outfits. Doug and I don't have mud outfits, so we got... muddy. As you can see, it's truly November here. The leaves are almost all fallen off the trees and the days are overcast and dreary.

Ah, I'll just let the pictures speak for themselves.

St. Martin's Day in Bucharest... or not?

How times flies, it St. Martin's Day again. Just like last year, we'll be having a lantern parade for the kids... or that's the plan, at least -- it's raining here in Bucharest.

Defiantly, I spent all afternoon making two lanterns for my boys. What do you think, aren't they nice?

We'll go out, come rain or snow. The boys will be clad in their full-body rain gear and if the lanterns die, well, that's what lanterns usually do on this day. (The traditional end is to go up in flames but I've opted for the electrical sticks again, wuss that I am.)

I'll let you all know how it was and maybe post a picture or two.

Tell it to the guys on Str. J. M.

Y'all know by now that Ashcroft has resigned. And you've probably read parts of his good-bye letter to Bush that is indubitably going to become a (in)famous manuscript in days to come:

"I take great personal satisfaction in the record which has been developed. The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved. The rule of law has been strengthened and upheld in the courts. Yet, I believe that the Department of Justice would be well served by new leadership and fresh inspiration."
From the New York Times

To say it with Hilzoy, fancy that! Nobody bothered to tell me! Even more so, nobody bothered to tell those Romanian police officers on Str. J.M. They are standing guard in front of the building in which one of the US military attaches lives - two in a car and four in a van further down the street. They stopped and questioned me twice today when I picked up/dropped off parts of my carpool. We do look so threatening, what with four kids and two moms in a minivan.

I wished someone told them that all that threatening to the officer and his family is really imaginary and non-existent. Then I could do my carpool without being bothered. It would be nice for the officer to know everything is safe, too.

The most German date of them all: November, 9

November 9, 1848

Robert Blum is executed in Vienna. One of the more prominent members of the Frankfurt National Assembly, he was in Vienna to observe how the Austrians dealt with the revolutionary forces. Not objective at all, he spoke to the revolutionaries and even took part in street fights. His diplomatic immunity was ignored. His death ultimately marked the end of the 1848 revolution.

November 9, 1918

The first day of the German republic. The Kaiser abdicates (not quite voluntarily) and flees the country, Friedrich Ebert becomes Reichkanzler. It's the culmination of the German revolution.

November 9, 1923

Hitler's march to the Feldherrnhalle. His coup fails, Hitler is sentenced to five years imprisonment.

November 9, 1938

Kristallnacht.

November 9, 1989

The Wall falls.

Tragedy, terror, and glory. It's not just any day for Germans.

It's not the values, stupid!

The New York Times again. I can't stay away from it. Here's a new spin on why the Democrats lost the elections.

I think a case could be made that ignorance played at least as big a role in the election's outcome as values. A recent survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found that nearly 70 percent of President Bush's supporters believe the U.S. has come up with "clear evidence" that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda. A third of the president's supporters believe weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. And more than a third believe that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S.-led invasion.

This is scary. How do you make a rational political pitch to people who have put that part of their brain on hold? No wonder Bush won.

Oh.

Like Canada

I'm a single mom this week -- well, until Thursday, anyway. And while there is not a problem in sight (did I just say that? Why did I say that? I jinxed it, I'm sure!!), I'm also not brimming with clever tripes to share with the world. But finslippy is. Read this delightful piece.

Good night.

Bye week

I have to say, being the bringer of good cheer less bad tidings is not really a role I am accustomed to. Anyway, some poetry to start things off. I recently found a copy of Edwin Denby's complete poems at the Strand, New York City's famous used bookstore. Denby is better known as a dance critic -- a lot of those in the blogosphere -- and so his poetry should be doubly surprising:

Hung Sundays from Manhattan by the spacious
59th Street Bridge are the clear afternoons
In Astoria and other open places
Further in the enormous borough of Queens.

Thickly settled plain an ocean climate cleans
Rail and concrete, asphalt and weed oasis,
Remote Queens constructs like desert-landscape scenes
Vacant sky, vacant lots, a few Sunday faces.

In this backyard of exploitation and refuse
Chance vistas, weights in the air part and compose --
Curbs, a cloud, metropolitan bulks for use
Caught off guard distend and balance and repose.

So New York photographed without distortions
Show we walk among noble proportions.

The copy I have was given by the poet Ron Padgett to a student of his in 1997, and I can't help but wonder what story brought it to the Strand. There I also found Padgett's recent memoir of his father, Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers:

But the oddity of the larger situation dawned on me only years later: at one end of our house was the office of one of the biggest whiskey businesses in town, while at the other was the "office" of an avant-garde literary magazine. Really, though, I was simply imitating my dad: I had my office desk, I operated a cottage industry, and I pursued a project that most people would have considered bizarre. But what was truly bizarre was that Daddy was reading Beat and Black Mountain poetry.

One White Dove contributor, Ted Berrigan, at that time a graduate student at the University of Tulsa, thought of my father as a legendary figure, the last cowboy. A few years after The White Dove, when Ted and his young wife were on the lam, eluding her outraged parents, they holed up at my parents' house for a few days. Some months afterward, a man knocked on the door and asked my father if he knew a Mr. Ted Berrigan.

"Who are you?" my father asked.

"I'm a private investigator hired to locate Mr. Berrigan."

"Then get the hell off my porch."

Finally, Anthony Hecht died recently. Reducing a poet to a blurb, even less than an obituary, isn't good for any of the parties involved, so I'll conclude with his "Retreat":

Day peters out. Darkness wells up
From wheelrut, culvert, vacant drain;
But still a rooster glints with life,
High on a church's weather-vane;
The sun flings Mycenaean gold
Against a neighbor's window-pane.

Missing: some 6,000 missiles, give or take a couple thousand

Our reader Kevin would rather if we didn't refer to the New York Times so much. I'm sorry if I can't oblige today, Kevin.

Via the Washington Monthly, a link to an article about even more missing missiles in Iraq.

American intelligence agencies have tripled their formal estimate of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile systems believed to be at large worldwide, since determining that at least 4,000 of the weapons in Iraq's prewar arsenals cannot be accounted for, government officials said Friday. A new government estimate says a total of 6,000 of the weapons may be outside the control of any government, up from a previous estimate of 2,000, American officials said.

Well, I'm not going to fly over Iraq anytime soon, I tell you that. The officials don't know exactly when the missiles disappeared, so we won't be pointing fingers quite yet. They also don't know whether the weapons have left the country. They think not. That doesn't seem good enough at all.

OK, so they are not easy to use. Terrorists would need some training to be able to fire them accurately at planes, civilian or no. Somehow, this does not make me feel any better.

Weekend Photo Blogging

Slow weekend blogging

Weekend blogging - nobody reads us, we're busy with the kids. Slow days. For those still following -- read this op-ed in the New York Times, and this article in the German Spiegel magazine.

Those values everyone is talking about

I'm taking this out of the discussion on my earlier post because it's getting too long for the comment section. None of my thoughts is very original and it has all been said before, but hey: it's my blog so I can say it again. And the latest comments make me suspect that maybe I'm not making myself entirely clear.

I'm not afraid that Bush will institute himself as God's deputy here on earth. I'm not afraid that only Christians will be allowed to vote in four years. I'm not worried about "theocracy".

What bothers me is the apparent swing in people's minds. Bush appealed to the growing Christian fundamentalist base and even if he only talks the talk without any deeper commitment (which I think he does - a man who laughs at exections and doesn't follow up on Abu Ghraib doesn't have the moral conscience Christians should have), the public embrace of fundamentalism scares the shit out of me. The public bashing of homosexuals scares the shit out of me.

In the blogosphere, there is much talk about how this election was about values. Maybe, but those values seem to be xenophobia, homophobia, narrow-mindedness, and the need to control what's happening in other people's bedrooms. It's not about fundamental Christian values like modesty, love, integrity, compassion, generosity, and forgiveness. Jesus told us that we're not to judge others; only God can do that. Do the born-again live by that? I'm not seeing it. That's what I'm concerned about.

Hilzoy over at Obsidian Wings said it well:

When did the scope of moral reflection contract to the point where it covers only sexual and reproductive questions? And when did we decide that the point of morality was only to point out things to dislike, not to suggest any ideals for each of us to live up to?

51% of Americans voted for a government that tortures people, that
insists it has the legal right to torture people. A clear majority voted for a government that cares nothing about world opinion, that scoffs at international treaties, and that insists "you are either with us or against us". Millions of Americans voted for narrow-minded, mean spirited provisions targeting an unpopular minority. (We've had civil unions in Germany for years. The world has not stopped turning.)

I'm still asking myself, how can this be? Most of the Americans that I know are decent, kindly people. Then I think of the photographs from Abu Ghraib. Did you know that nobody over the rank of sergeant is standing trial for that? Hundreds of people, most of them innocent civilians, tortured, beaten, sexually abused. An unknown number killed. But no officer, no general, no cabinet member is being held responsible. Just a handful of underlings (who all say that they were "just obeying orders"). Maybe as a German I'm particularly sensitive to this issue, but I go back and look at those photos and I think: how? How could anyone give these people another chance?

Bernard says that he wants his government to keep him safe. OK. But
don't homosexuals, US-citizen homosexuals, have the same right? How safe do you think gay people in Michigan, Oregon, Arkansas, or any of the other eleven states that passed anti-gay amendments feel today?

Here's an e-mail posted at Andrew Sullivan's blog:

I'll tell you, being a 16 year-old gay kid in Michigan just got a hell of a lot worse. When I woke up this morning and saw the anti gay marriage proposal had passed, I was shocked. I realized the situation I'm faced with everyday in school - the American people have just shown my classmates that it's perfectly fine to discriminate. A direct quote from a 'friend' at school today: 'It's so cool that all these states just told all the faggots to eat shit and get the hell out...'

As to the reversal of Roe v. Wade and that Christians don't want to overturn it because they need a safety valve for those fallen ones -- that's bullshit. Sorry to be so upfront. But I know these people - some of them are part of my family. They are very, very strongly pro-life.

Bush opposes the freedom to choose. He has cited Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, two of the Court's most virulent opponents of Roe, as his model justices. He'll have the chance to nominate two, maybe three new judges in the next four years. It is very likely that his nominees will share his views and vote to overturn Roe v. Wade if they are confirmed by the Senate.

You think the Democrats will block them with filibusters? Well, that just got a lot harder. Now it only takes 4 Democrat defections instead of 8 to break a filibuster. And, come on -- they can't block very nomination.

Remember the torture memo? What happens when the President has five Supreme Court justices who agree with it? Who say, yah, sure, the President can strip a US citizen of rights by declaring him or her an "enemy combatant"? Who say, well, habeus corpus doesn't apply to prisoners of war, and this is sort of a war? That's not liberal panic-mongering; those are exactly the positions the Bush administration has been pushing for the last three years.

So -- I'm not worried about "theocracy". I'm worried that a clear majority of Americans don't care if people are locked up, tortured, humiliated, stigmatized, denied basic human rights... if those people are different.

I'm worried about what kind of country this is.

A heavy heart

I thought long and hard about how to write about my feelings and concerns. Then I read this post by PZ Myers over at Pharyngula. He expressed my thoughts much more eloquently than I could have -- and also more forcefully than I would have, and I can find no fault in that. I recommend reading the entire post but here's an excerpt:

An unjustified, futile war…doesn’t matter. Abu Ghraib…doesn’t matter. Tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians…don’t matter. Prisoners tortured and held without trial at Guantanamo Bay…doesn’t matter. Throwing away two centuries worth of the world’s respect for our enlightened principles…doesn’t matter. A president who laughs at executions and mocks the sacrifices of our soldiers…doesn’t matter. The Democratic candidated dared to say that our reputation in the community of nations mattered, and the arrogant bully won.

As I said yesterday, it's not the time to despair and mope. It's time to put your foot down and do something. My first step was to sign the pro-choice petition. If you are pro-choice, and you have a moment, please consider signing the Freedom of Choice Act Petition and/or sending an email to George W. Bush telling him that you will stand up against a reversal of Roe v. Wade. I have to tell you that I was scared both times. Who says that I won't be denied my green card extension for speaking my mind? But if I give in to fear, how will I explain this to my children?

Let me tell you something about my family. I had two grandfathers, like most of us. One grandfather got actively involved with Hitler's regime -- he was a Gauleiter, and he wore the uniform of the Wehrmacht proudly. He thought Germany had a right to invade other countries because they used to belong to Germany, once. I remember him as a kindly old man who taught me the names of the stars and which mushrooms are edible. I loved him very much.

My other grandfather was 10 years older, had been in World War I, and was a reserve officer of the German Air Force. He put his foot down in the Air Force headquarters in Berlin one day, urging his fellow officers to stand up against Hitler because he was "crazy and would ruin us all".

He was reported and his arrest and execution was scheduled for the next day. He was warned by a friend and could escape, and spent the next two years in hiding. I never met him - he died when my mother was 13. I'm sorry that I never had the chance to tell him that I'm very proud of him.

One day, I will tell Alan and David about their great-grandfathers, and about how important it is to recognize wrong and do right. That right is not always what the government says it is. That good people and good countries can do terrible things sometimes, and that those terrible things are no less terrible than the terrible things that terrible people do.

My next step was to send a long letter to my US-American family -- about half of whom have voted for Bush -- and explained where I stood. This is probably going to cause some heated discussion but I felt it was necessary.

Last, not least, I've changed my icon. The smiley face seemed horribly inappropriate for all these serious posts; not that I have stopped smiling or anything. But it was time for a change anyhow.

I opted for the ginkgo leaf as my new symbol. Ginkgos were once almost extinct, today they populate cities and parks all over the planet. They all have their ancestors on a small chain of hills in China. They needed help, though. They are very, very old and the little dinosaur that probably helped to spread its seeds is long extinct. Without human help, ginkgos cannot survive.

There's a lesson in this: It's never too late to change the course of things. But it needs some help.

It's all over now

We're deeply depressed. We're oscillating between despair and disbelief.

I agree with Scott that it's a decision on morals. One TV commentator said that people voted for good old values. I can't agree. Just as I can't believe Bush is really a Christian, because he lacks compassion and modesty, good old values are not about alienating the world and making everyone feel threatened. Good old values to me are respect for your fellow humans, manners, thrift, responsibility, respect for the rule of law.

I look at Abu Ghraib and I don't see good old values. I see fear and loathing of homosexuals used to rally the faithful, and I don't see morality. I read about how the President can declare any US citizen to be an enemy combatant, and can hold them without trial indefinitely, and keep them from legal help, and do things to them that -- well, that are not "torture" because they've changed the definition. But I can't look at this and say, yes, this is right. I can't look at my little boys and say, sons, be proud of this.

It seems to me that "values" are more likely to mean xenophobia. Fear of the Other, fear of those who are different. Fear of terrorists, of homosexuals, of foreigners, of liberals... poor old liberals! They've been losing election after election, everywhere, for years now. But they're still deeply scary, I guess. It seems to me that fear, not values, was what this election was about.

I am not an American citizen. But my husband is, and my children are. It's my adopted country, and I'm in some way part of it.

So what then shall we do?

Get active. Find a good cause -- pro choice, pro science, pro sex education in schools. Pro-something. Anti-fear.

We will. I promise.

It's not looking so good

If I weren't so horribly worried, if I didn't have this feeling of impending doom, then I wouldn't be so unhappy about Bush winning. But I truly believe that another four years of Bush will be very bad for the US, and for the rest of the world. Obviously, it's not a view shared by most Americans, or so it seems at the moment.

Sigh.

Of course, there is still time to surprise me!

Hope springs eternal.

And it didn't hurt a bit, did it?

I'm done with the upgrade. There was a little "huh?" moment when I had to execute some cgi-scripts and had no idea how to do that. After fooling around with WS_FTP (didn't work) and Putty (didn't even get to the right directory), I called my brother, the physicist. He told me to put the URL of the script into my browser. Who'd have thunk it so easy?
Then we had some glitches with the main menu style sheet which I managed to solve by myself -- don't ask me what I did. It's like looking for things in a dark room when I do software.
Anyhow, we're done and things remain as usual for you, dear readers.

And now go vote, if you haven't already.

Doing the upgrade

We are upgrading our Movable Type software. I hope everything will go without a glitch, I did prepare thoroughly. Likely though, something catastrophic will happen. In this case, please refer to this mirror. It's just a safety net, a trial version of Typepad that we're using to get over those hours or days of fooling around with the new 3.121 version of MT. I hope we don't have to use it for too long -- it expires after 90 days, so I better hurry, eh?

I have to say, I like Typepad just fine. However, we'd need a multiple-author, HTML-editing license and that's the most expensive one. My dear Scot and I decided that's too much to pay if you can do it for free.

Anyhow, here we are -- I'm doing the upgrade. See you all soon, I hope.

Waiting

So we are having an early morning election breakfast/brunch tomorrow. Friends will be coming over, there will be coffee, food, and alcoholic beverages according to results (champagne if we win, palinka to drink ourselves into amnesia if we loose). Our friends are all rooting for Kerry, so nobody is going to get hurt. Our doors are open from 7:30 on, the breakfast will seemlessly go over into the Wednesday baby group and continue on as long as... No, let me rephrase that. It will go on until we're tired of it.

I'm very nervous. I had CNN on all day, just to get the usual results from something-Notch, and then my maid asked me: "Why is it so important who is president of America?" I have to say, I was at a loss for words there, for a moment or two. Indignation bubbled up in me and I said: "Because Bush is evil." One would assume I should have been able to come up with reasons. Like, rational things. It seems this whole venture has gotten to me.

Anyhow, as long as we're waiting, here's a cool graphic to play around with.

Now I better do some more preparation. In case you are interested, there will be homebaked bread, cheese, buttermilk pancakes, lox, chicken curry, spinach quiche, omelette, veggies sticks with herb dip, banana bread, and oatmeal cookies.

I like to eat when I'm nervous.

Oh, yeah, lest I forget: VOTE!

Risk of Choking

We stopped at the McDonalds in Otopeni on Saturday. That's the first town north of Bucharest, where the airport is. The McDonalds sits right on the main road north to Ploiesti.

(We were coming back from a trip to a little horse farm, where Alan rode on a pony for the first time ever. I'm sure someone will be posting some photos real soon now.)

Anyhow: we bought a Happy Meal -- look, we're parents with two small children, okay? Happy Meals are a part of our life now, and probably will be for a while to come. Alan, age two and a half, now recognizes those golden arches from a mile away. "French fries!" he cries. And it is, dammit, convenient. No, I'm not defensive about this. Not at all. -- We bought a Happy Meal, and it came with a toy, and the toy was in a plastic wrapper. And on the plastic wrapper, it said:

"ENGLISH -- Risk of choking -- small parts. Please retain information for reference. Drain after each use."

That was all. Except that the plastic bag was covered with writing, on both sides.

Why? Because it repeated that same warning in thirty-five different languages.

That is not an exaggeration. I counted. Here they are.

Azerica (the language of Azerbaijan)
Bulgarian (in Cyrillic; all languages were in their native alphabets)
Castellano (i.e., Castilian, i.e., Spanish.)
Catalan
Czech
Danish
German
Georgian
Greek
Estonian
French
Croatian (not to be confused with Serbian!)
Hebrew
Icelandic
Italian
Latvian
Lithuanian
Magyar (Hungarian)
Macedonian (not to be confused with Serbian! Or Bulgarian!)
Arabic
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Slovenian
Serbian
Suomi (Finnish)
Swedish
Turkish
Ukrainian (not to be confused with Russian)

There are some interesting things about this list. Frex, there are a few languages missing. No Albanian, Armenian, Bosnian, Irish, Kurdish, Slovak, or that weird fourth language they speak in Switzerland. Guess that shows you guys where you rate. Ronald McDonald, he knows you not.

On the other hand, Catalonia is now an independent country now, apparently. And The Language Formerly Known as Spanish is now "Castilian". Go figure.

McDonalds appears to be shipping these toys from one central factory to restaurants all across Europe and beyond -- from Iceland to the Caspian Sea. Sort of awe-inspiring, when you think about it.

Anyhow. I'm keeping the plastic wrapper. Maybe I'll have it on hand, the next time I hear an American acquaintance grumbling about how everything in the States is written in both English and Spanish these days. Or maybe it'll just be a tangible symbol of European... um, something.

Weekend Photo Blogging

On Saturday, we went to the Hollandia Riding Club in Corbeanca. Alan and David loved watching the horses -- although Alan decided that ponies were all right but horses way too big. He did get to ride on the pony for about five or ten minutes. He looked his most serious, I've never seen this look on his face before. He smelled like horse afterwards and talked about "riding like a big boy" the rest of the day. Afterwards, he had a three-hour nap. That hasn't happened in months. Oh, all the excitement.

David wasn't allowed to ride the pony since he's very much too small. So he was just left watching, and being adorable.

Sunday, we went to Târgovişte with friends of ours. Târgovişte used to be the capital of Wallachia back in the good old days - one of the princes who resided here was our old friend Vlad.
Târgovişte was also the city where Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife Elena were executed in 1989 after a rather showy trial.

Here's the old royal palace (very much 19th century restored), with the church in the background.

The kids loved running around in the ruins. Walls to climb, bridges to cross, countless rooms discover, and to play hide-and-seek in -- all that in warm and sunny weather, what's not to like?