Boing Boing » Europe

Is this the best song from this year's Eurovision Song Contest?

Rob Beschizza — Sat, 18 May 2013 20:20:31 +0000

The battle of the bands, featuring acts from Ireland to Israel, is underway as we speak. Embedded above is Cezar Ouatu's particularly excellent It's my life, this year's Transylvanian entry. Our Europe Correspondent Leigh Alexander will be filing a report, but not until she's had a bit of a lie down.

Medieval Europeans knew more about the body than we think

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 17:17:14 +0000

Medieval Europe is generally known for its animosity toward actually testing things out, favoring tradition over experimentation and earning a reputation as being soundly anti-science. In particular, it's easy to get the impression that nobody was doing human dissections at all, prior to the Renaissance. But it turns out that isn't true. In fact, some dissections were even prompted (not just condoned) by the Catholic Church. The knowledge medieval dissectors learned from their experiments didn't get widely disseminated at the time, but their work offers some interesting insight into the development of science. The quest for knowledge in Europe didn't just appear out of nowhere in the 1400s and 1500s.

Student Riots in Italy: a dispatch from Jasmina Tesanovic

Jasmina Tesanovic — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 20:05:02 +0000

When I myself was a protesting student, I remember vividly remembered the cold warning in the text by Pier Paolo Pasolini. He reminded us youngsters that the police we faced in the streets were also someone's children, that not all young people were fortunate enough to be in colleges rather than wearing uniforms, and that we should join all together against the general oppressor, the system, capitalism, the corporations, name it…

That was then, and this is now, and while the students and policemen still have the same interests, they are still on the opposite sides of the barricade. Austerity has driven Italy to its knees. Day by day the future of Italy's young people is vaporizing, and now the streets are flooded by torrential rains, to boot. Italian cities rocked by earthquakes might as well settle for witchcraft, rather than find responsible and competent government officials who can rescue the nation's casualties.

A Facebook comment from my Italian friend:

Is it possible that all these years every time there is a demonstration we have to expect the same song: attention to the provocateurs + protestors cruelly beaten by the police + poor policemen beaten by provocateurs = Am I missing something: Democracy!

In Torino, a 15-year old high school student posted on her Facebook a photo of two girls kissing in front of the heavily armed police. With these words: this is how we should face the forces of order!

She told me: those horrible Black Bloc destroy our attempts to do something peacefully, and we are not protesting only because there is no money left in our schools, but also as Europeans who understand that austerity program kills the students in rich as well as in poor countries.

Yesterday during the "No Austerity day in Europe", proclaimed by students and trade unions in major towns in Italy, the protests turned to riot and turmoil. In Torino, three policemen were injured, one badly. The number of students/citizens injured in Torino is not yet known. Chantings and peaceful legal manifestations degenerated into beatings and insults.

In Rome, along with a general strike of transportation, the Tiber flooded, paralyzing the nation's capital. Even on its best days Rome can barely move.

The targets of protesters were banks, public administration offices, and even the twelve-starred European flag, a flag so deliberately dull that it rarely attracts a passionate attention. The center of protests are the countries in crisis, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy…but even the well off northern countries are crippled by the Austerity, which is rapidly become a crisis much worse than the Crisis it was supposed to fix. Choked by Austerity, Europe is sliding into Recession again, and there's no sign that this approach will ever restore prosperity.

The word Austerity, that calm and bureaucratic term, is enough to cause panic in the streets of Europe now. National majorities know that it's a weapon against their own interests. Where is the "Austerity" for the one percent of the population dominating the economy? They don't apply any example of severe austerity to their own habits and aspirations. Secured in private jets, or within their high tech mentally-gated communities, they wonder why the streets grow slick with blood, sweat and tears.

This is something new in the world. It's rather like the alienation and anomie of the Industrial Age, but it's a new cybernetic detachment -- the atomized individuals of the Network Society, super-connected to screens, but failing to live and breathe together as a civilization. The Smart City shows its dark side as a gridwork of surveillance, as the peaceable consumers of the 1990s become a rabble to be kettled up!

United Europe just won the Nobel Prize for Peace. Where's the peace and Union from Austerity?

The Decent People: LGBT pride in the former Yugoslavia

Jasmina Tesanovic — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 22:12:36 +0000

Years ago during the reign of Milosevic in Serbia I wrote an essay called "Decent people". It was about that 80 percent of Serbian people, the classic silent majority, who lived in denial of the genocide in Srebrenica, the snipers in Sarajevo, the shelling in Dubrovnik.

These so called decent people who could not grasp cruel political and military reality. Eventually the damage to daily life became impossible; the decent people could not go through with their charade of normality as postmen, engineers and dentists. On October 5th 2000 a million people took to the streets in Belgrade and physically deposed the tyrant.

However, time stopped then in Serbia. An October 6th never dawned for a bewildered Serbia, not even 12 years later, on the anniversary. Milosevic died behind the bars in the Hague, my Yugoslav-era parents are deceased, my postman is on pension but the inhabitants of the Serbian parliament today are the next generation of those decent people. No painful truths were admitted and confronted; there was a rebellion of the decent, but not a thorough change in the society.

Typically, a few days ago the new elected premiere of Serbia forbade the Gay Pride annual parade. He claimed that 80 percent of the Serbian population is against gay manifestations, and warned against the risky and inevitable gay-bashing that would follow in the streets. This new premiere is an old member from the deposed Milosevic' s party. Crushing the aspirations of Serbian gays has become routine, and he has already handled the trouble successfully before.

There's only been one actual, public, blatant Gay Pride Parade, in 2010, held with heavy police escort and, yes, violent incidents from right-wing hooligans. These populists are well-rehearsed agitators, whose extremism is easy to predict, but the decent people are in many ways worse. In 2001 we held a street event for gays, and everyday citizens yelled obscenities, spat on us and pushed us around. I vividly remember a middle aged man, his face was distorted by hate and righteous anger, trailing our pro-gay banners and yelling insults. I thought he was a deranged stalker, but next day I met him in the local green market, along with his wife and a small kid. He was polite, neighborly, saying hello. He was a respectable patriarch of a small family, shopping in public as all decent people do on Sundays, except when society fails so utterly that there's no money left and nothing in the shops. As for spitting on me: he was proud of it and considered it a civic duty.

The Serbian gay pride parade was held indoors this year, more a protest than a parade. There was still a lot of fuss made by the police, who treated the press center as if it were a besieged fortress, ghastly emptying Belgrade downtown and isolating the gays. The activists inside four walls were promising one another a better future, but many avoided the farcical non-parade.

It's become an opportunity for foreign friends and supporters to write mails of support. The western countries are perfectly aware that the Serbian right has made gay existence a wedge-issue, so for their part the West makes it a litmus test for their own attitudes toward the new reign in Serbia. The big picture is grimmer. In Russia and Ukraine there are serious attempts for re-criminalizing gays and the Serbian is quite encouraged by these Slavic examples of a weird new KGB-Orthodox-fundamentalist autocratic alliance.

My friends in Italy recently successfully performed gay parades, plus a gay marriage in public with all the witty joy of commedia dell'arte, in the land of Pope! However, in Italy too the decent people shy away en masse from the specter of gay marriages and legalized gay couples. The Italians were trying to console me with the universality of homophobia.

But Italian society, raddled with the sexual decadence of priestly abuse and Berlusconi's harems, can't possibly be so densely solid in denialist ignorance as the Serbian decent people. The Serbs have been defending their heretical, unorthodox Orthodoxy for centuries, from attacks from east, west, north, south and center. The rigor and the pressure had a fossilizing effect.

In Italy you will be casually ripped off as a tourist -- everyday Italian decent people will cheerfully defraud foreigners, disgracefully cheating and chiselling for a couple of euros. In Serbia the hospitable decent people would feed a guest with their last crumbs of bread and salt, but then put the guest's severed head on a pike if he offended their code of honor. The very strong Orthodox church which dictates aggressively the new-old codes of Christian fundamentalist expansion, is in open alliance with the new/old political regime, the government which was heavily involved in wars and war profiteering.

However, there are fits of disturbance as well. During the gay pride week in Belgrade, a show appeard by a Swedish artist Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin , titled "Ecce Homo." It deliberately and rather hilariously depicted Christ and his disciples as gay leather-boys. This rampantly blasphemous show was protected by two thousand policemen while a rally of so called family people seized the opportunity to push the right wing agenda around the corner. Belgrade, which is after all the home-town of Marina Abramovic ( even though it never acknowledged the work of the world famous artist), attracted some activists and art fans to enjoy and appreciate the show.

Homophobia, nationalism, racism, clericalism, fundamentalism all have the same root: the fear of Other, and the same aim, the homogenization of all differences. If you're gay you at least have the joy of knowing that your struggle is shared world-wide, but the planet's decent people, wrapped in political deceit and faith-based superstition, seem to be shutting themselves into a planetary series of ever-narrower, ever more stifling closets.

Ex-physicist in charge of Europe's largest economy

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 16:20:40 +0000

Did you know that German Chancellor Angela Merkel has a Ph.D. and used to do research in quantum chemistry? I did not. (Via Jennifer Ouellette)

Texel, Netherlands: An island where science and culture meet

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 19:57:56 +0000

The Frisian Islands are barrier islands off the coast of the Netherlands. Between these islands and the mainland, there is an area called the Wadden Sea. This sea is only wet in some places, at some times. Instead of being a proper body of water, it's speckled with shallow pools, wetlands, mud flats that flood and dry up depending on storms and changing tides.

That geography makes the Frisian Islands, including the island of Texel, a great place to go beachcombing. During high tides and storms, water from the North Sea flows into the Wadden Sea through inlets. Not all of this water flows back out again, some evaporates. And water isn't the only thing in the North Sea. Wander the mud flats after the tide goes back out and you'll find all manner of random things washed up on Texel's shores—from buckets and signs, to bottles stuffed with anonymous letters.

On a more practical level, current patterns in the North Sea push whatever is in the water towards Texel. That means when a container ship loses something like a box full of luxury coats, the beaches of Texel are a great place to find it again. All that flotsam and jetsam (both the useful and the whimsical) helped create a culture of beachcombing on Texel. For generations, people went down to the shore and finders-keepers was the name of the game.

You can watch a new 14-minute documentary on Texel beachcombers and the goodies they've found. It's called Flotsam & Jetsam and it's available on Vimeo and it's really interesting—a great example of how the realities of nature and science can shape the way culture develops.

Watch the documentary Flotsam & Jetsam

Read a geosciences master's thesis that explains in more detail how the tidal mud flats at Texel work.

Via the Annals of Improbable Research

TOM THE DANCING BUG: Super-Fun-Pak, featuring Pato Afortunado mit Heinrich Hund!

Ruben Bolling — Wed, 23 May 2012 15:45:11 +0000

Support Tom the Dancing Bug and receive untold BENEFITS and PRIVILEGES by joining the brand new INNER HIVE right now!

"I signed up the second I read about it. It's a lot of fun. I enjoy hearing Ruben tell the story behind each of his comics. Good luck, Ruben!" -Mark Frauenfelder, INNER HIVE member since three weeks ago

Earthquake and bombs in Italy: An eyewitness report from Jasmina Tesanovic

Jasmina Tesanovic — Sun, 20 May 2012 18:36:48 +0000

[Video Link.]

A weekend of fear and mourning in Italy.

Early this Sunday morning, an earthquake struck near Bologna: at least six killed (ceramic workers, and a hundred year old person), and big material damage in the region. The US Geological Survey heard the tremor: a magnitude-6.0 quake struck at 4:04 a.m. Sunday between Modena and Mantova, about 35 kilometers north-northwest of Bologna. Civil defence says that the quake was the strongest in the region since the 1300s. And the damaged building are valuable historical sites. In Italy such loss goes without saying.

We felt the earthquake in Torino, 260 kilometers from Modena at dawn. The apartment building shook and the late-night party people yelped with alarm in the streets. As I write this we hear the building crack and we tremble: I am checking on twitter. Yes, it' s an aftershock at 15.19.

Not unusual for Italy to deal with deadly earthquakes, but what comes afterward can be nearly as troublesome: state neglect and real estate speculation. Those who are not under earth may have the skies as a roof forever! The last big earthquake in Aquila in 2009 speaks about that.

On Saturday morning, a bomb exploded in front of a high school, killing a 16 year old girl and injuring several other students seriously. This school bears the name of an antimafia activist, but it seems this was a terror attack. As if this distinction mattered: what cruel frame of mind, what political activism wants to bomb teenage schoolgirls? What is this message supposed to convey?

Fear and anger among citizens: standings all over Italian towns in solidarity with bombing victims in the southern Italian town Brindisi, and loud opposition to the reign of terror of anonymous bombs against civilians. The "strategy of tension" was notorious during the "lead years" in the seventies and eighties.

Italy in these days is targeted as the next country after Greece to be tumbled out of the euro zone into severe recession and collapse. The new Monti government, struggling to undo Berlusconi's long unruly reign in mere months, is imposing grim economic measures. Monti was a banker, and now is a prime minister: the trade unions blame his approach as inspired by and for the financiers rather than the population. Even Italian lighthouses auctioned off to tackle public debt pile.

"They stand on imposing headlands with spectacular views of isolated bays and white sandy beaches, some of the most picturesque in the Mediterranean." (Telegraph, UK)

The rate of unemployment among young people is 40 percent.

Italian flags are at half staff for three days of mourning. The international press has been reporting on the school killing as well as the earthquake: the social networks are full of useful news and active support for concrete initiatives. This awareness doesn't stop the Italian earth from shaking, the euro from falling, or criminals from killing the innocent, but it's a vital sign in our modest domain of life.

—Jasmina Tesanovic

Germany: Riot police clear Occupy Frankfurt (photo)

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 17 May 2012 18:24:19 +0000

REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach

German riot police carry a demonstrator fully covered in paint as police clears the camp of occupy protestors in front of the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt, May 16, 2012.

Your land, my land, island

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 17:02:12 +0000

Uninhabited Market Island in the Baltic Sea is home to an international border between Sweden and Finland that is shaped, convolutedly, like the number 2. The New York Times explains the history behind this, one of the strangest borders in the world. (Via Doug Mack)

Austerity is Europe's mutual suicide-pact

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 17:55:43 +0000

Laurence Lewis's Daily Kos editorial, "The cruel stupidity that is economic austerity," is a blazing indictment of austerity as a means of recovering from recession, and it cites experts and statistics showing that austerity programs (in Europe, particularly) are deepening the recession, destroying lives, and demolishing vital social institutions that are especially needed in economic downturns. Lewis's citations are not to the usual suspects in the fight against austerity, but rather to rock-ribbed conservatives and publications like The Economist, the chief economist of Standard Chartered, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. And there's Joseph Stiglitz, who compares austerity to medieval blood-letting: "when you took the blood out, the patient got sicker. The response then was more blood-letting until the patient very nearly died. What is happening in Europe is a mutual suicide pact."

How bad is it?
* In Greece, we now have record unemployment, which includes the majority of young workers. Homelessness is up 20 percent, with soup kitchens in Athens reporting record demand, and the usually low suicide rate having doubled.
* Portugal has complied completely with the austerity demands it accepted for its bailout deal, but its debt is growing and its economy is shrinking, its unemployment rate continues to reach new heights, there is a crisis in medical care, and a 40 percent rise in emigration, with the Portuguese government acknowledging its own failure by actually encouraging its citizenry to leave.
* In Spain, austerity has resulted in falling industrial output and deepening debt, with record unemployment and a stunning rate of 50 percent youth unemployment. And the Spanish government's incomprehensible response is to impose even more crushing austerity.
* Ireland has fallen back into recession as austerity has led to falling economic output. A better future is being sacrificed, as young workers look for work abroad, "generation emigration" expected to number 75,000 this year.
* The success of Italy's wealthy technocrat government was concisely summarized in similar terms: Italy's austerity measures are stunting activity in the euro-zone's third-largest economy, recent budget and economic data show, suggesting the steps are backfiring.

The cruel stupidity that is economic austerity (via Making Light)

(Image: GREEKS PROTEST AUSTERITY CUTS, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from piazzadelpopolo's photostream)

How To: Pack for a European Vacation

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 15:41:33 +0000

Back in high school, I purchased an old travel guide to Europe at a library book sale. It taught me some valuable lessons about inflation and changing social expectations. But I really only used it for ironic comedy value.

My friend Doug Mack, on the other hand, took his interest in 1960s travel guides a bit further. He actually went to Europe, following the advice and directions of Arthur Frommer's groundbreaking Europe on Five Dollars a Day. He's written a book about his experiences, called (appropriately) Europe on Five Wrong Turns a Day.

It's a bit more than just wacky hijinks, though. One of the interesting things Doug gets into in the book is the history of why Frommer's guide ended up being so important. It's hard to imagine today, but there was a time, not so very long ago, when the concept of "budget travel" did not exist. Frommer represented a major shift in how Americans thought about vacationing, especially vacationing to Europe.

To demonstrate just how profound that shift was, Doug put together a video illustrating the packing advice of Temple Fielding—the most prominent travel author before Frommer.

The list of items comes from a 1968 profile of Fielding by John McPhee in The New Yorker:

"Fielding uses two suitcases, and in them he packs thirty-five handkerchiefs (all of hand- rolled Swiss linen and all bearing his signature, hand- embroidered), ten shirts, ten ties, ten pairs of undershorts, three pairs of silk pajamas, eight pairs of socks, evening clothes, three pairs of shoes, a lounging robe, a pair of sealskin slippers, and two toilet kits. . . . He wears one suit and carries two."

Also, to get around baggage fees— a headache even back then—Fielding carried a raffia basket (the airlines didn’t know how to classify it, so they essentially just ignored it; try that on your next trip). Its contents included “a bottle of maraschino cherries, a bottle of Angostura bitters, a portable Philips three-speed record- player, five records (four of mood music and ‘one Sinatra always’), a leather-covered RCA transistor radio, an old half- pint Heublein bottle full of vermouth, and a large nickel thermos with a wide mouth.” He also had a calfskin briefcase that he designed himself and whose copious compartments held another forty-one items, including bottles of brandy and Johnnie Walker, a yodeling alarm clock, plus more standard items like toothbrushes and notebooks.

Buy Europe on Five Wrong Turns A Day

All is not well in Greece

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 05:03:57 +0000

A gasoline bomb explodes at riot police during a huge anti-austerity demonstration in Athens' Syntagma (Constitution) square February 12, 2012. Historic cinemas, cafes and shops went up in flames in central Athens on Sunday as black-masked protesters fought Greek police outside parliament, while inside lawmakers looked set to defy the public rage by endorsing a new EU/IMF austerity deal. Below, a protester hurls rocks at riot police; another flees.

(photos: REUTERS)

Response to Boing Boing post on "Police Pad" gadgets in Georgia, from the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia

Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:57:23 +0000

Editor's Note: In response to an anonymously-sourced wisecrack we published about police corruption in former Soviet states, the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs has responded with a statement, which we are more than happy to publish in full.

Georgian Police: Model for Successful Transformation

The article published on [Boing Boing on] January 12, 2012, about the initiative by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia to introduce new portable field computers (so called “Police Pads”) ends with an anonymous quote declaring that "100% guaranteed those crooked, fat, lazy cops will be using these devices primarily for porn and Russian gambling services."

Stereotypes like this are easy to toss out—but are quite simply incorrect. This quote does not reflect the productivity, effectiveness, transparency, and reliability of the police force in Georgia today, but rather the bygone era of the 1990s, a reality that has drastically changed thanks to an ambitious and successful reform process.

The reform process in Georgia began immediately after the 2003 Rose Revolution. The new government inherited a completely corrupt and bloated law-enforcement system. The systemic corruption and the high level of crime throughout the country resulted in a very low level of public trust: fewer than 10% of Georgians had confidence in the police, according to 2003 polls. And the very low average policeman's salary (approximately $68 per month) made the soliciting of bribes routine.

Georgia has since made the creation of an efficient and modern police force a national priority, undertaking a series of reforms that sought to rebuild the national police force literally from the ground up. The entire national police force was fired, and a new force hired, trained and deployed with the aim of meeting the highest international standards of professionalism.

These reforms are widely regarded as an unqualified success. Having reduced corruption and bribe taking to levels comparable to those in Europe, the police in Georgia have earned the trust and respect of the public they serve:

•According to Transparency International’s latest Global Corruption Barometer, in terms of public perception Georgia has the world’s 5th least-corrupt police force, placing it ahead of Germany or even the United States;

•According to the survey conducted by the International Republican Institute (IRI) in November 2011, 87% of population have confidence in Police;

•According to a survey funded by the EU and conducted by GORBI Institute in 2011, Georgia has one of the lowest "victimization coefficients," a measure that reflects public perceptions of crime and individual security.

On the subject of the so-called "Police Pads," reforms have transformed what was once an antiquated backlog of paper files for car imports, registries, and customs. They have been replaced with new, cutting-edge technology capable of streamlining requests and filing paperwork in record time.

Georgia has much work to do in shaking off the vestiges of nearly a century of Soviet occupation, but the transformation of our police force into a modern and professional service is an achievement that Georgians are deeply proud of, and a symbol of our commitment to retake our rightful place in the European community.

January 16, 2012
Press Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia

Photo: An employee demonstrates a "Police Pad" at the Algorithm factory in Tbilisi, Georgia, on January 11, 2012. Five thousand police officers will receive portable field computers, equipped with features that will assist them with their work, assembled at this factory, according to local media.