The adventures of James Bond's grand dad

Today's movie was the newest installation of Guy Richie's Sherlock Holmes saga and I am calling it a saga because the ending had epic amounts of sequal bate put into it and why not, since Richie has managed to create a fairly entertaining action film adaption of the classic detective novels. Yet again there will be spoilers.

Basically the movie revolves around Sherlock's epic war against his arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty. Moriarty naturally has a diabolical plan to acquire wealth and power at the expense of the rest of humanity and naturally Sherlock is stop Moriarty's plan. Asside for a few homages to the original stories, the plot has nothing to do with Conan Doyle's famous stories. That is not necessarily a bad thing since the mystery novels would be hard to translate into an action film. Overall the plot is fairly predictable, to the point that you can pretty much guess what is going to happen next, based on the less than subtle clues that the movie throws in your face. Plot isn't really this film's strong point and its not really trying to offer anything new, instead of settling on offering us what anyone who has seen most of the James Bond films have come to expect.

What makes this film gets right is the humorous interaction between Watson and Holmes. Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law play their roles extremely well and Downey Jr. seems to take real pleasure in dragging his sensible comrade through some pretty bizarre situations. The humorous banter between the two provide most of the entertainment in this film. Most iterations of the famous detective portray Holmes having some sort of mental illness, Jeremy Brett's Holmes was Manic-depressive, in the new series he is sociopath and Downey's seems to suffer from ADD. Law's Watson follows the traditional faithful Watson who suffers through Holmes's insane plans as a loyal friend should.

The other characters are OK, but nothing truly memorable. Moriarty is sophisticated, intelligent and ruthlessly evil. I liked the Moriarty in the new modern version of Sherlock Holmes more, who was bat shit insane. This films Moriarty went down the traditional path. Other character Richie failed badly with was Irene Adler, the only woman capable of outsmarting Holmes and the only woman he has ever been attracted to. She is dispossed of early in the film and Holmes shruggs of her apparent death without much adoo. I am generally against needless love plots, but in this case the amount of attention the relationship between the two deserved a better ending. Especially since the only motive for having her killed was plot convinience to give room for the new female lead, who's name I can't remember(as you can see this move worked brilliantly well). Adler was a part of Moriarty's organization so being torn between her love for Holmes and her obligations to Moriarty, would have offered potential plot points that were left unexploited.

The action scenes were fairly well done and were pleasent to watch. I liked Richie's style of first showing the fights in slow motion, describing Holmes's analysis of the likely outcome of the fight, before he shows it in high speed. The only scene I didn't really like was Holmes & Co escaping from Moriarty's weapons factory, where there are slow-mo shots of them being shot at by a wide variety of weapons, ranging from pistols and rifles to mortars and howitzers.

The one thing that started to bug me in this film was that it was set in 1891 and it featured a crap ton of weapons that were anachronistic. Most notable of being the Mauser C96 pistol, which wasn't produced untill 1896, a model 1895 Maxim machine gun, the Big Bertha-looking Howitzer which wasn't built untill 1914 and some type of submachine gun again not invented untill WWI. Another weapon really out of place was the Gatling Gun, a weapon that was obsolete in 1891 was being actively built at a modern weapons factory.

Another thing that really bugged me was Moriarty's grand plan, which was basically to take over a company manufacturing war materials and starting World War I to make a profit by selling supplies to all involved, basically by orchestrating basically a fictional version of the events that started the real WWI. There are few massive flaws in his plan. The greatest being that his main factory is Germany, so when Germany goes to war with France they are just going to let you ship vast quantities of war materials from Germany to France? I think not.

It isn't necessarily the most profitable plan to have a weapons and ammo factory in country that is in war, since governments in war basically tell you the price their are going to buy the materials from you, if you refuse they will just send some troops to take over the plant and let someone else run it. Also during war governments want cheap, functional weapons and equipment in bulk, with low profit margins. They are not interested expensive and complex weapon systems and even if they are, their faults are easily discovered by testing the weapon in actual combat conditions. The threat of war, that fuels an arms race, is the best time for the weapons industry, that is the period of time when governments go for the expensive fancy weapons system to get ahead in the arms race. Moriarty could make some profit, but most likely the countries involved would takeover his factories. Generally weapons industries are thightly controlled, especially in war time.

But I digress, overall the film was relatively good light action entertainment in the tradition of the James Bond films of my childhood. If you liked James Bond films by Roger Moore, then you will probably like this film.

Customer service and Social Media

This is something different after the string of movie reviews, we will be discussing customer service and the effects that Social Media has on it. The rise of Social Media has made providing a good customer service experience ever more vital. If your customer is an avid user of Twitter or Facebook and an owner of a smart phone, any failure or success can be reported to the world at large instantly. This can be a powerful marketing tool that gives potential customers real life reviews of your products and services by actual users. In my personal experience I would trust more in reviews made by users and customers like me, than on reviews made by journalists. One great example from my life is Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a game that I purchased based on a Lets Play video on Youtube by some random guy I have never met in real life. This is the first game in years that I bought that wasn't from the bargain bin and it solely happened due to me seeing someone else having a good time playing it.

On the downside negative experiences shared can have devastating consequence to your business. For example if I were to invest my money on something, the last place I would go to is Alexandria Bank, largely due to learning from customer experiences of other people. Based on customer comments I see Alexandria as a cut-throat sales organization that is looking only at their own bottom line. That doesn't sound like the type of people I want managing my investments. But these experiences are not what inspired me to write this. Alexandria isn't the worst example out there, they are a successful banking company largely due to them being cutthroat sales people. No there is an infinitely worse example how bad customer service and online PR can lay waste to your tech start-up.

Enter Ocean Marketing. You can read the whole story here. For any studying marketing this should be hilarious. http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/27/ocean-marketing-how-to-self-destruct-your-company-with-just-a-few-measly-emails/

Not only do these people completely fail at communicating with their customers, they also manage to piss of the founder of an influential gaming site, a rather important communication channel for a start-up that is trying to market a gaming peripheral. To add to compound their disaster nearly all of the emails are possessed by the sort of bad grammarz that are prime building material for internet memes. And guess what a bunch memes have been spawned out of this incident , here is one of them.

When your business has failed so badly that you are the unwitting father of several not so flattering internet memes, it is time to say goodbye to your career in e-commerce and find a new one. The amount of stupid shown by these people it is clear that a good career move would be to become a test subject for psychological experiments on human stupidity. Failing that other types of medical experiments would work as well. This way these people would contribute to the society at large in a more meaningful way than just being a cautionary tale for marketing textbooks and an internet meme.

Alien Hunter - When Contact meets the Thing

Watch this nice little Scifi film last night and it wasn't that great or that bad either. It about an alien pod that crash lands into the Antarctic and a group of scientists that discover it. The pod also emits a mathematics based signal that the lead scientist tries to decode. Sound familiar? Its basically the Thing mixed with the Contact. The movie even uses stock footage from the Thing, since the makers of this film didn't have the funding to shoot their own "finding an alien on ice"-scene. Just a warning there will be spoilers.

The protagonist of the movie is played by James Spader, who is a mathematician of sorts, sent to the remote Antarctic research station to decode the message. Not at all surprisingly he has a shady past, with SETI where he did something bad and since he is James Spader he also ruined his career by sleeping with a student. Naturally his fling is also posted on the research station.

Much of the film is spent decrypting the message the alien pod is sending, while the other half of the group tries to open the pod. Not a smart idea since the message ends up being "DO NOT OPEN", naturally the message gets to the group too late and the pod is opened, revealing the first surprise of the film. The alien, while technologically advanced, is actually benign and the only thing it really wants is to make contact with humanity. Sadly however the alien carries a deadly disease that it is immune to, but that will instantly rot nearly any living organism on Earth. I really liked this twist, I was expecting a poorly made CGI monster to pop-up and start massacring the crew, but thankfully they went for something more original.

Due to a misunderstanding the alien gets killed. The station gets a call from the US Government that promptly informs them that this incident happened once before and the procedure set for this event is the immediate incineration of the area with nuclear weapons. The group has a couple of hours to live until a Russian submarine gets into position to nuke the area. The rest of the movie is spent watching the group come to terms with their fate and preventing the two assholes, who were willing to gamble on the fate of the entire planet on the off chance of them not being sick, from escaping. The ending sort of sucked, Spader chases the one guy trying to escape to the outside of the station. Where the aliens, who were looking for their lost comrade, appear. They kill the asshole and save the remaining scientists. The Russians nuke the research station and the world is saved.

I really liked the concept of this film. The aliens were not evil, they didn't want to harm humanity, in fact they wanted to contact humanity, but they understood that humanity wouldn't survive the encounter due to the disease they were carrying. The pod being where it was, was an accident, an alien pilot who used an escape pod to survive whatever disaster his ship encountered. The threat was from a disease, which follows in the tradition of the first contacts we have had on this planet of ours. The Native Americans were wiped out by European diseases they didn't have any immunity to and we still get fun stuff like AIDS and Ebola from the jungles of Africa. This would be probably the greatest threat this planet, when we encounter an alien species. A single bacteria or virus from them could wipe out all life on this planet and one of ours could do the same for them.

The ending well at least they set up the aliens desire to make contact with humanity well in advance before they showed up at the end. It was a bit of deus ex machina, but I can live with it, but they could have played a heroic ending for the scientist who saved the planet through their sacrifice. The second thing that bugged me was that if this wasn't the first time this happened, why did the fairly simple message DO NOT OPEN sent in such a complex way. If the aliens met humans before and have been listening to our broadcasts they could have set a simple morse code message, something in the order of "DO NOT OPEN. Yes that means you Moron. Leave the alien pod alone. Just walk away. We will come and collect it."

Overall it was a decent film that provided interesting new perspectives on the "aliens of doom" and "first contact" genres.

Starship Troopers or Sam and the Art of War

Starship troopers is once again a sucky movie based on a much superior book. The book was written by Robert Heinlein one of the masters of science fiction on the level of Asimov and Clarke. The book describes the live and adventures of a unit of Mobile Infantry, a group of hand picked highly trained elite soldiers who fight against horde's alien "bugs" using powered exoskeleton armor festooned with advanced weaponry. This is the first instance in literature of the fabled Power Armored Space Marine, which have since become the cornerstone of any space military game or story.

Heinlein's world is a one where to become a citizen with full voting rights you have to complete a set number of years of Federal service. Before you start screaming "militarism", you should know that the military service is not the only option, in fact since the Mobile Infantry is an elite unit, they only accept the best candidates. The real kicker is that if you volunteer for service the Federation is required to find you a position that fits your skills and abilities, this maybe something as benign as teaching a group of orphans or something more dangerous like being a guinea pig for medical experiments. I like this concept a lot, if you want to volunteer there is always a place for you to go to, which is in stark contrast to Finland for example, good luck getting into the national service with a serious medical condition.

The movie on the other hand fucks a lot of what's great about the book. In the movie the Mobile infantry is just a bunch of dudes with assault rifles making suicidal human wave attacks against aliens that can rip a man to shreds in 5 seconds. The federal service is limited to the military and they take anyone, drowning the whole concept of well-trained well-equipped elite soldiers in a pile of bullshit.

Tactics in this movie are almost non-existent, the main idea is to run with-in 5 meters of an alien and then proceed to shoot it to bits with your assault rifle on full auto. To makes this even more stupid, the movie even has an informertial that shows how a single bullet to the aliens head will kill it instantly and yet every single scene of the troopers shooting at alien is a one where they basically blast every other part of it off before shooting it in the head. This movie tries to be a film about an infantry unit fighting aliens but it was blatantly obvious that the makers didn't have the slights idea of how infantry fights.

Here is my way of fighting a bunch of melee oriented aliens in the Starship Troopers Universe.

1) Train my troops to FUCKING AIM. If all it takes to kill one is one bullet shot into its head, it is pointless to shoot at anything else, the troopers should be trained so well in the art of head shots that they can do it in their sleep while both their legs are cut off. This simple tactic is even easier to do on the bugs since their head is basically in the center of their body mass.

2) Train my troops to shoot at FUCKING LONG RANGES. All the shooting in the film is done at virtually point blank ranges, an assault rifle in our age has an effective range of 150-300 meters. A distance where the aliens have no hope in hell of hurting you.

3) Train my troops to use FUCKING TERRAIN. Charging into close proximity of a melee monster like the aliens in this film is nothing short of suicidal. Pick an easily defensible piece of terrain like a hill, set up there, use my long range weapons to deal some serious death on the aliens while they struggle to get in close. A liberal use of field fortifications, mines, booby traps and obstacles make the prospect of the aliens ever getting to a striking distance even less likely. Even better if the cover is used properly it might even a take a while before the aliens figure out where the fire is coming from.

4) Get some FUCKING ARTILLERY. If the range of a 150-300 meters against a melee opponent sounds fantastic, how does a range of 20-40 kilometers sound like? A horde of tightly packed enemies in open is the dream of every single artilleryman in the history of artillery. A single battery of 6 modern pieces of artillery would make instant minced meat of any horde of the aliens in few minutes.

5) Use FUCKING MOBILITY to my advantage. In the movie the Mobile Infantry are usually dropped off on the planet by spaceplanes. Here is wild idea how about using those transports to move the troopers from point A to point B on the planet side as well. I would use the transport ships to move my infantry from one defensible position to another instead of moving by foot which is not only slow as hell, but also exposes my troops to ambushes. Greater Mobility+Longer Range Firepower=a bunch of dead aliens.

With these 5 simple principles you could drop the casualty rates of the humans from horrendous to insignificant and the inflict casualties on the level of genocidal on the bugs. The movie attempts to portray a bunch of overgrown insects as an existential threat to humanity, but really the only thing that threatens humanity is the apocalyptic levels of stupid exhibited by humanity, ironically when it comes to one of our favorite pass times, warfare.

Now that my major beef with this film is settled, time to move on to the minor stuff, number on being the cast. In the book as it is the film the protagonist is Johnny Rico. In the book Johnny was Rico's nickname, his first name was Juan. This was one of Heinlein's favorite tricks, he would build up a strong and likable character that the reader would love only to reveal later that the character was either african-american or hispanic, this was shocking when the book came out in 1959. The movie has no respect for Heinlein's efforts to fight racial prejudice, Johnny is played by a chicle jawed all-american white boy, in fact the whole cast is made out of soap-opera stars.

Why Hollywood, Why? Why can't you make a good movies out of good books? Why have you made fucking up old good movies and books into an art form?

The Thing - The old and the new

So I went to see another remake/prequel/sequel of a horror classic, the prequel to John Carpenter's masterpiece The Thing. The original The Thing is one of my all time favorite horror films, its a near perfect blend of psychological horror and gory horror, so I was very interested in seeing how badly Hollywood would butcher the film. On that department I wasn't disappointed the makers of the prequel pretty much missed completely what made the original so good.

The premise of the film is that an isolated research station in the Antarctica that gets attacked by an alien being that can perfectly imitate any living organism. In the original much of the psychological horror came from not knowing which of the characters are aliens and which are human. Another point of interest comes from the different ways the characters interact with each other in the situation where no one can really be trusted. It wasn't just about a bunch humans killing a lurking alien before it kills the humans, like in the Alien, but it was also about the internal conflicts in the group, the group had to deal with an external threat of the alien as well as the internal threat of the group disintegrating due to the lack of trust. The original also had some pretty good effects that made the alien look terrifyingly otherworldly.

Sadly the makers of the prequel completely forgot the psychological part of the plot and we are treated to a cavalcade of CGI Gore and jump scares. If you really, really, really love jump scares then this is a movie for you, there are about 10 scenes of characters walking in dark room and something jumping at them. Another favorite scene of the director is "the-character-is-looking-at-something-and-the-monster-appears-behind-her/him"-scene. Its really boring to watch basically the same scenes redone 20 times with different characters in different locations and its not scary when you can guess that in 5 seconds something will burst through the wall.

Another big problem this movie has is the characters, there are waaayyyy too many of them, I can't even remember most of them, they were your basic horror movie cannon fodder, that die for the sake of getting some gore into the film. When will Hollywood learn that feeling disgusted by gore isn't the same as being scared? I simple death can be scary if the scene is done well and its a character that we the audience we care about. Seeing some dude who said three lines in the film getting torn apart by some alien monstrosity isn't scary as much as it is sickening.

But back to the characters. In the original you had an array of characters, who were all individuals in their own way. You had MacReady the helicopter pilot, a take action sort of guy who medicates the hum-drum boredom of the research station with alcohol, Childs who has authority issues and constantly challenges anyone trying to take charge, Garry who is the base commander and a law & order type, Windows, the high strung radio operator, Clark the quiet giant with a heart who is the dog handler of the base and so forth. Although not all characters are not fully fleshed out and discussed in-depth in the movie, you still get the sense that they are all individuals with strengths and weaknesses and different reactions to the situation at hand.

The remake messed up the characters pretty badly, there were the bearded Norwegians and then the American pilots, then there was the science dude, who was more concerned about his Nobel price than about human lives, the main character was Kate of whom I can't really say anything since her actions were more driven by plot convenience than by any characteristic in her character. The only character I liked was Lars, a Norwegian who didn't speak English, he was bad ass and hearing him curse in Norwegian was awesome. At one point it looked like he might become MacReady of this film and he had a sort of an understanding with Kate on how to handle the situation, but by halfway he gets taken out of the film.

Overall the film was unmemorable and watching it mainly made me wish that I was watching Carpenters version. You are failing as film makers if I feel bored watching a horror film, which was what I was feeling half way into this mess, because I could pretty much guess what was going to happen, the element of surprise was missing, what made the original fun to watch was how unpredictable the characters were, one dude starts destroying the radio and shooting at people, one tries to start doing the same, there is an argument over who should be in charge, accusations start flying around etc. The new film was a predictable as they get. I wasn't a really bad film, the makers just missed the key elements that made the original good, and that made it a mediocre sci-fi horror film. If you haven't seen The Thing, watch the original its a much superior film.

The Wicker Man - The Old and the New

So I watch the 2006 remake of the horror classic The Wicker Man from 1973 and guess what it sucked, like nearly all of Hollywood's remakes do. The original movie is a classic film that blends a mystery and horror seamlessly, the basic premise of the plot is that the lone cop is sent to an isolated island to investigate the disappearance of a little girl. The island is inhabited by pagan weirdos who deny the girl's very existence and that's where the hunt for clues begins.

The main character in the old was a devout roman catholic who never married and has chosen to live in celibacy. He is sent to island because the local cops receive an anonymous letter telling of about the missing girl. He behave's as you would a devout catholic to behave towards a group pagan's, he is an asshole. This is understandable since his beliefs were almost constantly put into question and he is literally the fish on dry land when he goes to this remote place with customs vastly out of his comfort zone. This is something that most of us can relate inspite of not sharing the ideas and beliefs of the character.

In the remake Nicky Cage plays a cop who very obviously suffers from PTSD and is called to investigate the disappearance of the girl by his ex-fiancee. He is still an asshole and treats the locals with contempt. Why? What's his problem? The roman catholic vs. pagans I can sort of understand, but Nick is just being an ass, maybe its his PTSD acting, I mean it already causes him hallucinations, but still. The second problem is that in the original the cop is doing an official inquiry, so he has the full force of the law behind him, Nick on the other hand is doing an investigation of his own OUTSIDE his jurisdiction, so why exactly don't the islanders just tell him to fuck off? They have no reason to let him go around turning it upside down, unless they have an ulterior motive, this should have been the first indication of how the plot is going to turn out. Not only is Nicky's character an asshole but he is also an idiot.

Most of the film is spent on watching the cop go around the island collecting clues, the old version again handles this much better. Its an investigation, the horror and shock elements come when he encounters something related to the islands cult that he doesn't understand. The new one feels the need to add Nicky's PTSD driven hallucinations into the mix. Its not suspenseful when you know of great its not real.

In both films central to the plot is the pagan religion of the islanders, in the old one it was done with a bit of subtlety. The Islanders were basically an average small English village who just believed in a different religion, but like all Hollywood remakes always have to supersize an aspect of the old one , this one had to supersize the religion aspect. This time the island has a fertility cult made mostly out of women, in fact we never see a male islander speak. It all comes of as just weird, why do all the men in an island full of hot women who believe in a fertility cult look so miserable? That would be any bachelor's dream destination. Ergo everything is not as it seams.

Now for the SPOILERS, so stop reading if you want to watch the film and still enjoy the film. I think the new one might be more enjoyable if you don't know how it ends. You have been warned.

So it turns out that the whole missing girl thing was just a ruse to get the protagonist on the island. The islanders rely on agriculture for survival and since the last years harvest was an abysmal failure and to insure a good harvest they need a human sacrifice, so they lured the cop there to be the chosen one. Yet again the remake decided to go for the supersized route, in the original the cop was just doing his job and he was largely selected because the cult needed a virgin christian, in the new version, Nicky gets lured to the island by his ex-fiancee who apparently got on with him just so that she could get pregnant and later their past relationship could be used to lure him to become a human sacrifice. Oh and the missing kid, turns out to be Nicky's daughter. For fucks sake, so the islanders need for human sacrifices is so great that they send attractive young women to seduce men and have their children, so that years later they can be lured on the island to be killed. Do they have like a data base on these guys?

Even the sacrifice scene was supersized in the remake, in the original the 100 or so islanders basically just tell the cop that you are going to be sacrificed and then they get on with it. The chosen method of sacrifice is burning the man alive inside a giant wicker man, hence the name of the film. In the remake, the islanders first break his legs, almost kill him with bees(Nicky is allergic to bees and the cult is big on bees) and then hoist him up to the head of the wicker man to be burnt. Just a side note here, when your legs are broken being hung upside down by your legs must hurt like hell. Not only does this film indulge in needless gore, but it also forgets the whole gore literally in the next scene. For fucks sake.

The thing that really bugged even about the original, they ritually murdered a cop. Generally cops tend to go through hell and high water when one of their own goes missing or is assumed to be killed. Gee, we sent Jimmy to the weird island with the religious weirdo's to investigate a missing girl and we haven't heard of him in three weeks, I wonder what is going on. In the remake this aspect gets even worse, generally missing children in this day age lead to massive police operations, hell the Americans even have a system called the Amber Alert to mobilize the media to aid in the search. So why exactly doesn't Nicky just report the girl missing and bring the hammer down on the issue. Also murdering a police officer for religious purposes would cause an unbelievable shit storm in the post 9/11-world.

This is the thing that I hate about Hollywood in the 2000s. They really don't have any original ideas anymore, they are just making remakes, prequels and squeals of old good films, usually without much success, not that they really need to put any effort into it, the audience goes to see it because they liked the original and are generally disappointed. Hollywood you make a big stink about how much money you are losing to online piracy, well I am very hesitant to pay 10 or so euros to see anything by you guys since I mostly end up disappointed beyond belief. Its not that you are any better than the online critics who make their own videos which use clips from your films to make fun of the said film, when you mostly repackage other people's ideas in the first place. At least the online critics inject creativity into what they do and generally provide better entertainment than you guys. I would rather watch spoony, Nostalgia critic or the Nerd rage about your films for 20-60 minutes than actually pay to see most of them myself.

The War with too many names

A little break from Star Wars prequals and instead I am going to talk about the Finnish Civil War, what its called and how these names implicitly interprete the events of this war.

As the saying goes "a beloved child has many names". This war according to the Finnish wikipedia has been called by the following names (English Translation will be parenthesis) vapaussota(War for Freedom), luokkasota(The Class War), punakapina(The Red Rebellion), torpparikapina(The Share Cropper Rebellion), kansalaissota(Civil War), vallankumous(the revolution), kapina(The Rebellion) ja veljessota(The War of Brothers). All of these intreprete events of from a certain perspective, but there is one that really, really pisses me of, because the interpretations that it implies to are so far from what the war was about, what happened during and after, that anyone who uses it or believes in those intepretations is either ignorant or deluding themselves. This name is Vapaussota or The War for Freedom as I will refere to it from now on. To explain why I think that this term is so wrong, we will have to explore the reasons behind the war and the events that followed it. But before we go into that I should probably explain what the implied interpretations are as I see them.

The War for Freedom implies that the war was about liberating Finland from the tyranny of something. In its most extreme form this idea generates images of the war being a prequal to the Winter War, which was a struggle for freedom and survival, where the Brave and Patriotic White's drove away the Evil Hordes of Russian Commies and their treasonous Red Finnish allies back to the oppressive godless communist hell-hole known as Russia. The underlying theme her is that the White's were liberating Finland either from the tyranny of the Russian's or some form off tyranny by the Red's. Now to why this is complete bullshit.

First of all the causes of this war had nothing to do with liberating Finland from the tyranny of anything. It was basically about how Finns should solve the many economic and social problems caused by the First World War and the revolutions in Russia and in a larger sense how and by whom Finland should be governed in future.

The Reds were predominantly for increasing democracy and the common people's chances to have a say in the governance of the country, how this was to be achieved depended on the political view of the particular Red, they had moderate Social Democrats who wanted to implement some for of Parlamentarianism to hard line bolsheviks who wanted a revolution like in Russia. A large part of the Red's agenda had to do with worker's rights and social justice.

The Whites on the other hand were divided between the hard line conservatives, who didn't really like the 1905 constitution that gave everyone the right to vote and who wanted to go back to the way things were before the new constitution, to the moderate non-socialist liberals, who shared some of the viewes that the social democrats had. Their agenda's was overall about the typical right wing stuff, entrepreneurship, employer's rights etc.

While at the beginning of the war Finland had a parliament it was unable to solve the socio-economic problems, like food shortages and unemployment. The combination of these meant that people were loosing confidence in politics as means to solve problems and that people were beginning to divide into the two camps mentioned above. The greatest example of how great this division was, is the Finnish Declaration of Independence, which we had to vote on. The Social Democrats voted against, not because they didn't like the idea, but because it was the "Right Wingers" declaration, they published their own which was by and large the same as the one they voted against in the parliament.

The war itself began after Finland's declaration was accepted by Lenin and Soviet Russia and this why the whole idea of the war being about liberating Finland from Russia is complete non-sense. By and large at start of the war, Finland needed to be recognized by a few big countries like USA, UK and France to be a fully independent and sovreign nation.

I won't go into to too much detail about the events of the war except to say that the both sides commited acts of terror, used child soldiers and had prison camps where people died. The Reds received some weapons and support from the Bolsheviks in Russia, but not enough, largely because Lenin and buddies had bigger problems to worry about, like their own civil war. The White's however received a crap ton of support from Germany, who wanted to use Finland as base for their future wars with Russia. This support included weapons and the 27th Royal Jäger Battallion, which the germans had trained from Finnish volunteers who wanted to fight against the Russians, they also conviniently kept back the volunteers with Red sympathies. This aid culminated when the 10 000 men strong Baltic sea division landed in Southern Finland. Needless to say the Red's lost.

The greatest kick in the balls for the war being about freedom is what the White's did after the war. At the start of the war Finland was on the brink of becoming an indepdent and sovreign nation, with one of the most progressive constitutions on the planet. The first thing that the White's do is elect a King for Finland. A King. They wanted to turn Finland into a constitutional monarchy, with a strong King and limited democracy. This could have been more excusable if the guy elected as the King had been someone from Finland like Mannerheim, but when they elect a member of the German Imperial Family, all pretense of supporting Finnish independece sort of flies out of the window. The election of the German guy as the King semented a bunch of treaties that the White's signed with Germany, that in effect made Finland Germany's protectorate. This was so obvious at the time to everyone that USA, UK and France refused to recognize Finland's independence until the whole king idea was scrapped in 1919. So how in the hell the guys who turned an almost free and independent state into a protectorate of another Empire with limited democracy were fighting for the independence and freedom of the Finnish people?

And this is why I dislike the term Vapaussota so much and why I think people who use either don't know what they are talking about or are just deluding themselves.

The last argument for the whole freedom thing is that if the Reds had won Finland would have become a part of Soviet Union and again I think that this is bullshit. While Lenin certainly hoped that the Red Finland would join the Soviet Union(This was the whole reason for granting the independence in the first place), it wasn't really what most of the Finnish Reds wanted. It is often forgotten that at the time nationalism was one of the driving forces behind the Finnish Labour Movement and by extention SDP and the Reds. At the time nationalism and patriotism were almost a religion to all Finns not just the Whites. The Reds sincecerly believed that the ideas they were fighting for in the war were making Finland a better place for Finns, like the Whites did. The greatest proof of this is what happened some 20-years latter, when the former Reds were entised by Soviet propaganda during the Winter War. The response to the Soviet call for another Red revolution was universally FUCK YOU!!!!

The roots for the Finnish unity during the Winter War can be traced to the end of the Civil War. The idea of the Kingdom of FInland died with the German Empire at the end of First World War. What followed is in my opinion one the most amazing events in Finnish history. The moderates from both sides of the war came to gather and realized that for Finland to survive, they had to build Finland that was acceptable to all parties. White or Red Finland wouldn't survive, but a Finland of Finns would. They drafted a compromise constitution that was based on parlamentarian democracy with strong civil liberties, but had a strong democratically president to replace the King. On top of this alot of the reforms that the Reds were after were implemented, like the end of the sharecropping institution and issues related to worker's rights. Nor was SDP banned. This consensus policy was possible because people started looking at what was common between the two parties, namely nationalism. Everyone was very proud of being a Finn and Finnish culture and ultimately that was more important than the petty political struggles.

The farsighted men and women(well mostly men) behind this policy of reconsiliation were the true heroes of war. It is thanks to their efforts that Finland is what it is today. Without them there would have been no Spirit of the Winter War, that saved the country during the Second World War and laid the foundation for the modern Finland, that we know and love today. There are no patriots in civil wars, in fact patriotism is the first casualty of any civil war.

Star Wars Prequals Part 2 - Wanted! Characters for an epic space adventure!

Lets talk about the characters. If the plot of the prequals was an incoherrant mess, the characters are even worse, all of them are either complete morons, horribly miscast, not what they should be or could easily be replaced with card board cut outs. The actions of the characters are perfectly aligned with the mess that the plot is and only serve to add to the confusion. Lets begin with the autopsy of Qui-gon Jinn.

Qui-gon Jinn

Qui-Gon epitoimizes the stupid part of the characters. For the beginning part of the Phantom Menace he is mainly bland, soulless character who sails through the plot on auto-pilot. He reach the true levels of epic stupidity on Tatooien during the mission get parts to repair the ship our heroes are one. First is his party selection, which is R2-D2, admitedly always a smart choice, but why in the world would you want to take Jar-Jar Binks along, what possible use would he have for the rather important mission of getting the parts. Padme I can sort of understand, having her makes the team blend in a bit better by giving them more options for plausible cover story, but Jar Jar Binks is just a walking disaster area who is only going to attract attention.

But where the stupidity real takes over Qui-Gon is when he tries to buy the part, after not having the right currency, falling for the oldest sales trick in the book and even having the Jedi Mind Trick fail him, his next logical step was to make the most elaborate bet in movie history. Here are a couple alternate ways of dealing with the broken ship problem, that don't envolve massive bets on an 8-year old kid winning a F1 Grand Prix.

1) If using the Mind Trick to cheat in a business transaction isn't a problem, why not go to another merchant with your worthless currency, Mind Trick the guy into swapping it into local currency or for something that could be used to barter with Watto who has the part you need.

2) Take Jar Jar back to the ship and lock him into the ships brig. Then get Obi-Wan and the Captain of the Queens Guard to come along, for an epic rescue mission/robbery. Surely 2 Jedi Knights and a battle hardened soldier are more than capable of robbing some parts and rescuing two slaves from an unarmed merchant.

3) If fraud or robbery are too immoral for you, how about just sell the ship and buy a new smaller ship or just hire a transport to take the group back to Coruscant. Hell a ships captain might even take the money that the local junk merchant refused.

4) Or even more simply, just call to the Jedi Temple in Coruscant that you are stranded on Tatooien and need transport/parts to repair your ship. It shouldn't be beyond the means of the Jedi Order to help them out.

5) or while you are calling to the Jedi Temple, how about tell them that slavery is still alive and well on Tatooien and ask them to send a couple of hundred Jedi Knights to end slavery on Tatooien.

That would have actually made a pretty good plot for the prequals, instead of a random blockade of planet we know nothing about and care very little for, have the conflict be about slavery. The movie could like start with a slave revolt the now slaver Trade Federation guys are trying to put down, the Jedi are like coming to help the slaves and we could meet young Anakin who is like a slave fighting for his freedom. This would have something more relatable than some vague issue over taxation of inter-planetary trade. But I digress. What was I talking about, oh yeah Qui-Gon Sucks.

Yoda and all of the Jedi

How do you recognize a Jedi in the prequals? Simple, they are the dudes who run and jump around with a lightsaber. What made Yoda cool in the Empire Strikes Back was the fact that he was Jedi Master and he didn't have a lightsaber. Lightsaber is arguably one of the coolest weapons ever invented for cinema, so how cools is guy that doesn't need one? In Empire Strikes Back Yoda's weapon and tool is the Force, its the Force that makes him powerful, not his lightsaber. It is implied that as a Jedi Master he no longer needs one, with the Force he was found other means of defending himself and overcoming conflicts. It is like Sun-Tzu said "To win without fighting is best". When Yoda teaches Luke its not about the twenty cool lightsaber fencing techniques, its about how to use the Force and use it responsibly. The Jedi are defined by their use of the Force and how they use it to interact with universe at large, not by the weapon they use.

This is why every scene where Yoda bounces around like a pinball with a lightsaber is so god awful. Not only is the idea of Yoda fighting a bit odd, but if you had to give him a weapon and fight scene atleast give him a weapon that makes some God damn sense. The fight between count Dooku and Yoda is just stupid, because of the massive reach advantage that Dooku has, there is virtually no chance that Yoda is going to be able to land a blow on Dooku. Its sort of boring to watch a fight where one side has no chance to hurt the other. A much better weapon for Yoda would have one of those shurikens that the Predators had in Aliens versus Predator, with it he could overcome his size disadvantage and make the most of his Force powered telekinetic abilities.

Count Dooku and Mace Windu

These two characters fall to the horribly miscast category. Samuel L. Jackson plays Mace Windu, a character that is really difficult to talk about because he is just a bland character that is separated from the rest of the bland mass of the Jedi by the colour of his lightsaber. The fact that Windu, a calm and collected Jedi Master, is played by a guy who is at his best when playing angry and passionate characters only highlights his blandness. Similary Christopher Lee wasn't really a good choice to play the villain of the films. He does ok playing the evil aristocrat, who according to the dialogue is a political idealist(we never actual see any idealism in him because the plot is void of anything resembling an ideal), but he is still just a bad guy version of a bland Jedi, who is separated from the mass by having a different type of a lightsaber.

Both characters could have been saved with minor changes to the characters and by swapping the actors. Samuel L. Jackson would have made a great Sith. Make Jackson's Dooku a fanatical idealist, with a political ideology that we can either despise, like Fascism or totalitarianism, or have him take an ideology that we can identify with to an extreme, like taking freedom to anarchism. Also make him angry, Jackson would have been the perfect guy to play a Sith Lord, who is driven by anger and hate, derived from his idealism. In the same way Lee would have made for an excellent Jedi Master, just throw some Jedi robes on him, give him some wise Jedi stuff to say and you are done, or even better have him debate Jedi philosophy with Yoda. That would have given the film a perfect opportunity for some exposition about the Jedi and the Jedi philosophy, you know to add to our knowledge of who and what the Jedi are. It is amazing that even with 3 new films featuring Jedis heavily, most of what we know about them still comes from Luke's training scenes in Empire Strikes Back.

Anakin and Padme - it's a love story

Anakin Skywalker is the character that was possibly the one that Lucas messed up the worst. The original backstory for Anakin was that he was a good man who was seduced by the dark side. Anakin in the prequals was anything but a good man. He was a narcissist with strong homicidal and megalomanic tendencies. Most of what he does and says reinforce this image. Most of what Anakin says in the films is either about how awesome he is or bitching about Obi-Wan. Most of what he does in the films, he does to further his own ambitions and needs. As far as I am conserned, he was on the Dark Side when he started the Sand People Massacre.

You could argue that his love for Padme and the extreme's he goes to save her would make him a good guy, but I would argue against it. You see Anakin isn't really in love with Padme, he is in love with the idea of having her. He isn't saving Padme because he cares for her well-being but rather because he can't bare the idea of her leaving him. Her dying is just incidental, he would have reacted equally badly if say she fell in love with someone else or as happened at the end of Revenge of the Sith her leaving him.

What Anakin should have been, instead of the egotistical asshole we got, was someone like Luke Skywalker, a likeable selfless hero, and his story should have mirrored Luke's internal struggle in the Original Trilogy, except that instead of overcoming his inner darkness he was tragically seduced by it.

Padme was also tragically misplaced character. She fills the same spot as Leia did in the original trilogy, except that it was executed poorly. Her main point in the plot is to give Anakin a love interest and insert the mandatory love story into the plot to get the female demographic something interesting. Except that the love story here is executed badly. To make full sense of just how awful the story of Padme and Anakin is, you have to compare it to the story of Han and Leia in the Original films.

Leia and Han's story is probably the most interesting romantic subplot in any film I have seen, it is executed beautifully. The acting and chemistry between Harrison Ford and Carrie Fischer is great. The progression of the romance is well balanced, starting from the intial snarky comments at the beginning of Empire Strikes Back, to the moment of passion in the bowls of the Millenium Falcon, the constant nagging that Han receive's from Leia during the chase scene's and to the final declaration of love moments before Han is frozen. It's increadibly satisfying to see them finaly admit that they are in love after seeing them overcome the adversities imposed by the environment and their own egos.

This sort of thing is pretty much completely absent from the Padme and Anakin story. The only things that tell us that there is a love story going on, is that there is romantic music playing and two pretty people are walking around in spectacular scenery. The dialogue is god awful and acting isn't that better either. Most of the time Anakin looks like he is going to rape Padme in a few minutes, which is sort of understandable when you look at the revealing outfits that Padme is wearing.

To make the story better would have been to rework Padme from a badly done Leia clone into a seductive Femme Fatale type who slowly seduces the good and pure Anakin into abandoning his ideals as a Jedi Knight. She could have even been secretly working for Palpatine with the expresse intention of expaditing Anakin's fall to the Dark Side. And right after Anakin finally falls for Padme, the love story could have ended with Obi-Wan being directly involved with her death in the fight against Palpatine and his plots. How tragic would have it been if Obi-Wan, Anakin's best friend, had unknowingly killed the love of Anakin's life? Then it wouldn't have been very difficult for Palpatine, who might have engineered the whole thing in the first place, to manipulate Anakin into hating Obi-Wan and the Jedi, thus completing a journey into the darkness that innocently began with a love affair.

The Rest

The rest of the characters like Palpatine, Obi-Wan or General Grieveous I really don't have much to say. Some of these characters were basically ok even with some minor issues, but whose big problems have more to do with the overall assness of the plot rather than on the characters themselves. I thought Palpatine, inspite of some moments of unintetional silliness, worked well as the maste mind villain and Evan McGregors Obi-Wan wasn't that much of disappointment, inspite of momentary lapses into Qui-Gon like stupidity. He is in fact the only character in the films I remember having emotions that I could relate to. The rest of them were so bland, unmemorable and boring that I can't really comment on them except to say that they were bland, unmemorable and boring. Darth Maul and General Griveous fall into this category.

In the next part we will discuss CGI, special effects, lightsaber duels and the reasons why the prequals turned out into such a bloody mess.

Star Wars Prequals Part 1 - War without cause or consequence

There isn't much that can be said about the Star Wars prequals that hasn't been said by other critics about these films, but here are some of the big issues that I have with these films. If you want to view a funny indepth percpective of these I suggest watching Red Letter Media's reviews on these, just google "Red Letter Media Star Wars" and they should pop up. I have three big problems with these films, the plot which doesn't make sense and you can't get emotionally involved in, the characters that are blank, boring and unrelatable and the special effects that are surprisingly inferior to the original trilogy. Lets begin by diving into the plot, or as I like to call it "The War without cause or consequence"

The overall backstory of the prequals is the Clone Wars. Right of the bat, starting with the first scene of Phantom Menace, the causes of the war are shrouded in mystery. Phantom Menace starts of with an organization called the Trade Federation blockading the planet Naboo. Beyond a vague reference to inter-planetary trade and taxation, there is no explanation why? I have been thinking about this more than I probably should and I still have no ideal, if you have, please share it. What is even more confusing is that an organization made of traders, people who make money by buying goods and services from point A and transporting them to point B and selling them there for a profit, supports a blockade. If a group of merchants wants to prevent a planet from receiving supplies the simplest way to accomplish this is by not selling the said supplies to them and buying those supplies from the market so that it is harder for the planet to buy them from someone else.

While the causes of this remain shrouded in mystery, the consequence of the blockade and the subsequent invasion aren't felt by the viewer either, since the only people we ever get to see on Naboo are the Gungans, about 20 pilots and a bunch politicians. There are no forced labour camps, summary executions, bombed out buildings, refugees or looting and pillaging, everything seems ok in droid occupied Naboo. Beyond vague dialogue by the main characters about Naboo being in danger, there isn't really anything invested in this conflict.

The lack of clear military or political objectives is even more glaring in Attack of the Clones. In this film we see Count Dooku having a meeting with a collection of interstellar bad guys, but again there is no explanation why these guys want to go against the Republic. Clausewitz said that "War is a continuation of politics by other means" so what are the political objectives for the Separitist, what is the Republic doing to these people that would make them want to start a war and how is the life in the Galaxy going to change if they win? We need to know these things in order to care about the battle scene's on the screen. This is in complete contrast to the original trilogy, where the Rebel Alliance is fighting for freedom against the oppressive tyranny of the Galatic Empire. Its a political goal that most people on this planet understand and can relate to. The intensity of the battle scenes is greater since we care about what the heroes and villains are trying to accomplish.

While Attack of the Clones illustrates the lack of causes to the Clone Wars, the Revenge of the Shit (Wait there is something wrong with that title, nah, I'll look into it later.) illustrates the complete lack of consequence for the war. The movie starts of with a big space battle of Coruscant, the capital world of the Republic. The Separatists went down to the planet and kidnapped Chancellor Palpatine, while we could dwell into all the assness related to this plot, what really bugs me about this scene is that NOTHING happens to Coruscant. The Separitist fleet got to the orbit over their opponents CAPITAL world, with big juicy targets, like the Senate building, The Jedi Temple and the massive support facilities for the clones we saw at the end of the previous films. WHY for fucks sake didn't bomb the everliving shit out of those targets? That would have probably been far more damaging to the Republics war efforts than kidnapping of Palpatine. The Coruscant after the initial battle of Revenge of the Sith looks the same as before the battle. There are no ruined skyscrapers, wounded or dead civilians, refugees, no protests over how the Separatists could get so close to the planet, no anger, fear or any other emotion. Its just business as usual.

This lack of clear and relatable consequence isn't limited to just this one battle. Presumably this war has been going on for sometime now, but we never hear any eulogies for fallen comrades, we never see the anger, fear, horror and sadness that wars generate in humans and other emotional beings. The economic and social consequences are equally lacking, we never see the billions of refugees that flee the fighting, we never see buildings falling into delapitation or be destroyed in the fighting, we don't see people suffer under the heavy taxation needed to fund the war effort. Even the fall of the Republic and the Rise of Empire is largely void of consequences, beyond the destruction of the Jedi, life continues as normal for most of the people of the Republic.

This is again in complete contrast to the original trilogy, in which the consequence of nearly every battle are tangible and relatable. If the rebels failed to destroy the Death Star in New Hope or Return of the Jedi, then the Rebel base would be destroyed, as well as any other planet that dared to challenge the Emperor's rule and all hope for defeating the Tyranny of the Empire would be lost and billions of people would be in danger of loosing their lives and freedom. What could be a greater stake than that. This complete lack of relatable causes, objectives and consequences, makes the plot boring, vague, pointless and the only purpouse it serves is to transport the main characters from one pointless CGI battle scene to the next.

The more finer points of the plot will be examined in the next part which will deal with the characters.

Alan Wake

Alan Wake is a man who has it all, he is best selling author and he has a beautiful wife he loves. Except for three little problems his life is perfect, his wife is missing, he hasn't been able to write anything in years and every time it gets dark a bunch axe murderer's try to axe-murder him. He is the protagonist to the video game Alan Wake, on of the best games I have played in a while.

The basic plot is pretty basic, your wife is missing, find her and anything that gets in the way, dies. This plot has been around video games since the first Mario game. However this game is proof that even with a tired old plot like rescue the girl, a compelling, interesting and addiction inducing plot can be created. I played this game through in 3 sittings, just because I wanted know what the story was. I won't go into much details on the plot, its better that you see it for your self, expect to say that if you like X-Files, Twin Peaks, Twilight Zone or the works HP Lovecraft you are going to love this.

The basic game play is divided to two parts, during the day you spend your time talking to various people and looking for clues. The second part is the night, where you walk through dark forests, scary mines and other abandoned industrial properties, its during these segments that a bunch of homicidal mines, lumberjacks and factory workers. Amongst the daylight scene's there are also flashbacks and dream sequences. The overall atmosphere is spook and foreboding at night and the world is realistically built, for example items can be found in appropriate places, like flash bangs are found in one level in the boots of police cars.

The combat in this game has an interesting twist, you have to use your flash light and other sources of light to banish the evil that possesses and protects them, before blowing them away with your revolver, shotgun or rifle. There are also flares, that help to give you space when you feel a bit crowded by the axe-murderers, flashbangs, which will destroy anything nearby and the flaregun, which will instantly kill almost any enemy it hits. Over all the combat system is easy and fluent to use and offers enough challenge to keep you on your toes, but not too much to make it frustrating. The only complaint I really have is the lack of a melee attack, it would be nice if you could atleast push the guy who is trying to stab you away. Very often I found myself desperately mashing buttons in close quarter situations vainly hoping to unlock the non-existent melee attack.

As with all games these days, there is a bunch of stuff you need to collect largely for the sake of collecting them. You collect pages of a manuscript, that shed light on the plot, read signs that explain some of the history of the place your adventure is set in, listen to the radio to hear what is going on at the moment in the game world and watch TV to find out more info about the plot. I liked these, because usually you collect stuff that has no bearing on anything in the game, in this game you collect Coffee thermoses and break up pyramids of coke cans. I hate this kind of shit, its a cheap way to increase the replayability of the game.

Overall Alan Wake was an outstanding video game experience, that once again proves that video games are as effective of a media for story telling as movies and books are. I would recommend this to anyone who likes a good mystery story.

The Last Stand of the Cynical Pessimist

Cynisim and Pessimism are often used synonymously. This is not entirely true comparison, as I will now explain.

Cynisim is based on an Ancient Greek philosophy, that called into question the contemporary idea that wealth, power and fame were a source of happiness. Cynics asserted that these did not in fact lead to happiness, but rather the road to true happiness could be found by rejecting the material aspects of life and embracing a life of Virtue in harmony with Nature. This idea went on to inspire most of Western Ascetic traditions. One could even argue that Jeesus himself was a cynic.

I find this idea to be still relevant to the contemperorary society. The worship of materialism and the delusion that having money, power and fame is a road to happiness is more alive and well than ever. In fact we have turned the pursuit of material good into the foundation of our economy.

More recently cynics have turned their doubts into social and moral norms. Therefor cynicism is more about doubting than believing the worst about everything. Which leads us to the doctrine of believing that everything is bad, pessimism.

Pessimism is the belief that the cup is always half empty. Everything is always viewed in the worst possible light. Sending that job application is essentially pointless since it won't lead you to getting that job, there is no point in talking to that hot girl in a bar since she won't be interested and if she happens to appear to be interested in you, she probably has some sinister ulterior motive.

Now the big question is that if you believe that everything is going to fail and nothing will ever succeed, what is the point of doing anything? As a cynic and a pessimist I have found that having the mentality of a soldier fighting a last stand against an unbeatable foe.

A Last Stand is a battle where you are surrounded, there is no way to escape, no help or relief is coming and the enemy is superior to an extent that there is no question about the outcome, you will lose. In these situation the soldiers have two options, surrender or fight and die. Occasionally there might be a greater strategic motivation to fight or the enemy might have a reputation of cruelty towards prisoners. But essentially the easy way out is in either surrender or commit suicide. So why fight?

For two reasons, the predetermined outcome is as much of reason to fight as it is to not fight. Yes, you might expend a lot of energy and effort doing it, but being surrounded by the enemy sitting around waiting for evenetable is not going to be that much easier. The second reason is that there is the one in a billion chance that you might actually win, almost impossible is slightly better than impossible.

Even in the midst of the greatest bout of pessimism or during the deepest night of depression, I find great solace in this thought, I don't have to worry about the outcome since I already know what it is going to be. Sending a job application, while doomed to fail, is still better than not sending it. An extreme pessimist, who still attempts the seemingly impossible, is a much stronger than any optimist, because these people go beyond the outcome of an action, to them it is not about the outcome, they know that they will most likely fail and still do it, just for the sake of doing it. Under a barrage of failure, where the optimist will eventually be hard pressed to maintain their optimism and avoid having their hope turn to despair, the pessmist soldiers on as this is nothing but status quo for him/her. The success if it ever happens is a bitter sweet fruit to the pessimist, while to an optimist it is the lifeblood needed to sustain them.

PS While writting this I sent one doomed-to-fail-job application.

The wierdest reality show ever

I never though this would happen, but it has. I have finally found a reality show that goes beyond my comprehension. I mean this goes way, way, way beyond anything even the Japanese have ever cooked up. This makes Takeshi's Castle and Ninja Warrior or even Banzai look relatively sane.

And the winner is Storage Wars. It's show about a bunch of people who hold and participate in auctions of stuff found in abandoned storage lockers somewhere in America. No I am not making this up. This blows my mind on so many levels, first of all there is a group of people who make their living by buying stuff that other people once stored in storage room and later forgot about. All the stuff I have ever had in storage is the sort of thing that you haven't bothered to haul to the dump and everytime I move and have to haul this shit either to the basement or if unlucky to attic, I wonder what is this stuff, where did it all come from and what the fuck it is doing in my storage space. And somebody is making money by buying this kind of stuff and selling it on.

Second Mind Fuck of this show is that someone thought it would make interesting tv. So interesting in fact that they put the word WAR in to the title and you know when they do that its something radical and awesome. The cast also had cool title's like, The Gambler, The Young Gun or The Collector as if that would breath some character into three guys with sunglasses. Its a bunch of people in an auction where someone is selling other people's abandoned junk.

The third mind fuck is that this show made it into the second season. I could fathom how some studio executive was either temporarily insane, wasted off his/her ass, high on something, being controlled by wizard aliens or being blackmailed into putting this show on the air, but how in the hell this managed to make it to the second season. Apparently somewhere on this planet there is a bunch of people who found this crap interesting. I could barely make it through one episode. Even the best reality tv editor couldn't turn this into interesting or dramatic.

Making sense of the tragedy at Utoya

Last Friday one of the most devastating killing sprees was commited on the island of Utoya.

The attack on Utoya was exceptionally well planned and executed. The sheer brilliance of this most savage attack amazes me. If you think of all the detail that went into it, its absolutely brilliant piece of terrorism, from the selection of the target to method of attack.

The outline of the plan was fairly complex and it goes far beyond the typical Modus Operandi of the typical spree killer.

1)Detonate a bomb at an administrative center to create chaos and to distract the police, as well as giving the disguised murderer access to the target area.

2)Inflitrate the target area disguised as a law enforcement officer.

3)Use the uniform to lure the victims into a mass where they are easy to slaughter.

The target area was brilliantly chosen. As an island it is a confined space isolated by water from the rest of the country. This had two effects, firstly it limited the space where the victims could hide or run to, given enough time and ammunition the killer could have easily massacred every person on the island by systematically going through the island. Secondly the water hindered the police response, as they had to wait for a boat to get to the island, this contributed to the high death toll.

Terrorism at is core is about getting a reaction. The success of an act of terror is not measured by the death toll or the level of mayhem caused, its meassured by how well the target society's reaction matches the reaction desired by the terrorist. Therefor the success or failure of an act of terror is in the hands of the victims, not the terrorist.

In this case the objective was to get attention to the killer's political ideology. Therefor the best reaction is convict this man as soon as possible, lock him up into a small cell and forget about him. Remember the victims, but forget him, he is not worth remembering. That's why I don't refer him by name in this text, let his very name be forgotten and that is the worst possible punishment for this man. Let him live the rest of his life alone and forgotten.

It however saddens me that a person has to resort to mass-murder to be heard. This one of the common feature among spree killers and school shooters, they feel that no one is listening to them. By doing this sort of thing they get the attention they crave so much.

The worst possible response to this attack is to start censoring the ideas that he was supporting or the people who might share them. There are already calls in Finland to add to the censorship of anti-immigrant or racist ideas. While I find these ideas repugnant, I still believe that in a free society ideas must be exchanged freely. By limiting the freedom of speech of the far right you make violence more attractive to these people, violence generates media buzz and gets attention to their ideas. I would rather have their ideas presented as a part of the everlasting discourse between ideas that is so fundamental to democracy and let them be judged on their merits. The anti-islamic ideas didn't pull the trigger at Utoya, a man who believed that mass-murder was the best way to promote them did.

Finally I wish to say that we must never surrender to fear, if we do the terrorists will win everytime. Against a man like this, who is intelligent and absolutely commited to commiting acts like this, very free society has limited defenses. The police do their best to prevent these tragedies from happening, we can have systems that control access to firearms or chemicals needed to make bombs, but ultimately they will only slow people like this, not stop them. Unless we have the ability to police peoples minds there is no fool proof way of preventing terrorism and even if we had the ability to do so, I am not at all convinced that we should. We must live free with knowledge that there are vicious people out there who use the freedoms we love so much to harm us and that is the true price freedom.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows part 2

So I went to see the part two of the last Harry Potter film and I must say it was a bit disappointing again, but atleast it wasn't borring like the last one. Again SPOILER WARNING, as we will again descent into the festering pile shit that is the ending to this film.

The biggest disappoint I had was the climax. It was the most anti-climactic climax I have seen in a while. Harry Potter gets chased by Voldemort through the ruins of Hogwarts, they have a flying wrestling match, then the magic penis meassuring contest begins and then Voldemort gets a bad case of dry skin and turns to dust. Fight over. This was what the 7 movie build up lead to, it wasn't any different from every other fight HP and V had before. Here are a few examples how epic final battles should be done.


Luke vs Darth Vader


The final battle in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly


Bill vs the Bride

The movie also continued with the theme of forgetting everyone else besides Harry. Jesus, Harry Potter has one of the richest universes and atleast in this film that got almost completely wasted. The thread of Voldemort's dominion and its effects on the World of Wizards that was started in the last film was left abandoned. How are we supposed to give a rats fuck about the heroe's sacrifice if we don't know what it is at stake?

The Siege of Hogwarts scene was a bit mixed. While it was awesome to see the Hogwarts turn into the Battle of Stalingrad, there were some issues that really annoyed me. The first one was the magic shield, it looked like something out of Star Trek, I was sort of expecting Worf to pop up and report "Shields are down to 30% Captain" But more annoying was the fact was how Hogwarts was defended. The whole point of being in a castle is that you are in a place where the enemy has a problem of shooting at you while you have the opportunity shoot at the uncovered enemy with impunity. When The Dark Horde of Doom starts shooting at your castle its generally a smart idea to FUCKING SHOOT BACK.

But the most hilarious scene was when Harry dies, yes he dies, I told you there were spoilers. He goes into a white train station, has a talk with Dumbledore and he sees the skinned featus of Voldemort. Yes, he sees the skinned featus of Voldemort. I am not making this up. But no worries Harry apparently had a guest lecture from Jeesus on how to beat death and he comes back from death.

Other than that there were some pretty good 3D effects and overall it was entertaining but couldn't really live up to be the movie to crown the epic 8 movie saga.

The Six Pack

Well Finland got a new government, a coalition called the six pack, formed from the National Coalition, Social Democrats, Left Wing Alliance, The Green Party, The God damn Swedish Party and Christian Democrats. We have 19 new ministers to run the monkey farm known as the Finnish Government and here is where the weirdness begins.

Now we have 3 foreign ministers, it won't get confusing at all when the you add the president into the mix. You gotta love the tailor-made ministries, like the EU ministry specially crafted for Alex Stubb, as it won't make it at all confusing when we send the president, the foreign minister, the prime minister and Stubb into an EU summit. Stubb is very good at what he does, he is actually the first guy I ever voted for, but he isn't that awesome that we need to come up with a ministry just for him.

The foreign aid ministry is another political product of some major political clusterfuck. Granted foreign aid is important and it helps save lives, but is it that important that it needs a ministry of its own? This again is some political candy, this time to the Green Party, but I suspect that this is going to be the place where the anti-immigrant wing of the True Finns are going to went their anti-immigration frustrations. Then again the Green Party is a so called party with "values", among them NO NUCLEAR POWER, but that didn't stop them being a part of the most pro-nuclear power government in Europe, so who knows what the hell they will do with this position.

One ministry that thankfully got abolished was the immigrant ministry, largely because all the hate that the previous owner of the title got, no one was stupid enough to accept the post. Another traditionally painful ministry is the minister of agriculture, when the Center Party(Formerly the Farmer's Party)is in the opposition.

First Impressions, smoke and mirrors, job interviews and sociopaths

I hate the concept of First Impressions and the importance people give to them. Fuck. That. Shit. Judging someone by the first impression is like judging Christmas presents by the fucking wrapping paper they are wrapped in. How on earth does it make any bloody sense that you could draw any conclusions on something as complex as another person during the first five seconds?

Actually there was a time when it did. Between the time when humans climbed down from the trees and said "so long suckers" to the chimps and the time before humans climbed near to the top of the food chain, there was a time when those instant first impressions were the matter of life and death. Back then you had about 5 seconds to decide whether the thing you met was going to eat you, could you eat it or mate with it. But since then we have evolved to a status where the only animal challenging our position at the top of the food chain are mosquitoes and they only get away with it because exterminating them to a point of extinction would be too much of a bother, this reaction has become largely useless and even dangerous when applied to social situations.

First impressions is the ultimate form of the messed up smoke and mirror games we play these days. First impressions are as accurate of a picture of who we are as racial/national stereotypes, in fact they are a form of stereotyping. Stereotypes were born because we don't have the time or willingness to really look into the wonders of the world, but rather we want everything to fit the nifty little boxes in our heads that we use in the futile attempt to organize the world. Everything that doesn't fit into those boxes ends up in the box labeled "scary, complicated shit that doesn't fit anywhere else that is better left ignored".

And that isn't even the scary part, the scary part is that since the first impressions are nowhere near who and what we really are, they can be used manipulate and deceive. The best example of this is the Job Interview Game, its a game where the interviewer tries to determine whether or not the applicant fits into the Ideal Applicant Box and the applicant does everything in their power to build wall of smoke and mirrors by telling a carefully thought out web of selected truths, half truths and outright lies to create the illusion that they fit into the box, which in itself is an illusion. If the job ad says that they are looking for an independent minded people person, what kind of an idiot says on their application that they are an acerbic assholes who don't get along with anyone and need constant supervision. Its not like you can really tell who and what the person you are interviewing is in the 30-45 minutes you spend with them, you only get what they appear to be, which may or may not be a part who they really are.

This means that in order to survive in this world of ours, it no longer matters who and what you really are, as no one has the time or interest to get into anything that deep, complex or profound. What matters is how well you are able to create the illusions that fit into other people's boxes of how the world operates. This has lead evolution to create a group of people who are masters at this, sociopaths. These people are capable of deceiving anyone and everyone. They are master social chameleons that have the uncanny talent of getting into other people's heads and take a look at what kind of stereotype boxes the people have and then figuring out how to exploit this to the fullest. Sociopaths, the next step in Human evolution? Hopefully not, but its the logical conclusion looking at the world today.

The only way to avert this, is to say FUCK YOU to stereotypes and their bastard children the first impressions, stop playing those retarded smoke and mirror games, be content in being just who you are with all the flaws and gifts that you have and wonder at the true fantastically odd and scary nature of the world.

The Portugal Mess

Finland is currently facing one of the most difficult government formation talks in decades and the greatest issue on the table is the EU bailout of Portugal. Majority of the current Parliament wouldn't accept the package in its current from. Of the three parties slated to form the government only the national coalition(Kokoomus) is in favor of the package while the Social Democrats and True Finns are against the package. Its a difficult and complex issue to resolve, if not even impossible.

At the core the issue is pretty simple, for the past few years the Portuguese governments have been spending more money than they had and to plug the deficit they borrowed from investors around to the world money. The global financial crisis not only rocked the Portuguese economy, making the deficit even larger and making repaying the loans difficult, but also made the debt markets more wary of investing in at risk economies making borrowing even more difficult. Now Portugal is in a situation where it has a massive budget deficit, ailing economy and no money the repay the existing loans.

The EU package is meant to take some of the burden of the Portuguese by borrowing money at cheap interest rates to it and by guaranteeing its loans to the investors, this means that if Portugal can't meet its obligations someone else will pick up the bill. Another logical way out of this mess is for Portugal to cut its deficit. This option however is politically intolerable, since the cut backs would have a devastating effect on the welfare system, that is now needed more than ever in the ailing Portuguese economy. The human cost of the cut backs would be high as poverty amongst the portuguese would without a doubt increase.

Another aspect of the crisis is investors responsibility. For financial markets to work properly investors who make stupid investments need to penalized. Constant bailouts would encourage investors to make high risk high return investments with impunity. It would effectively privatize good investments and socialize the losses. This is not how a free market economy should work, if you make risky investments you reap the losses as well as the profits.
But again this to simplifying a complex issue. It is good to remember who the much maligned investors actually are. They are not some cabal of rich white guys living in luxury mansions, they are ultimately you and me. The largest investors in the world are various pension, social security and insurance funds. Funds which provide vital services to our society. It might that your pension money has been borrowed to the Portuguese Government. Losses would hurt these funds that are so vital to our welfare.

The other much maligned institution in this mess is the bank. Banks have been borrowing money to the portuguese as well and again the ones who suffer is not the cabal of rich white guys, but you and me. A large chunk of the money that the banks lend to others come from deposits made by the public, meaning that it is your money that is on the line. More critically banks provide the critical financial infrastructure that keeps our economies together. I have seen first hand what happens when that financial infrastructure is momentarily shaken and it wasn't pretty. Imagine what would happen if your credit card no longer worked and your internet bank would be there either. You would be pretty much fucked. Therefor we cannot just let the banks collapse at will because the effect on our society would be simply but devastating.

My solution to this monumental problem would be to construct a massive CDS(a Credit Default Swap for those who don't speak finance), where the EU would guarantee Portugal's loans against a fee that would correlate the default risk. The fee would be collected from the investors who wish to secure themselves against default. The fee money could be used to help the people of Portugal, by investing it in to the Portuguese economy. The condition for this could be that Portugal makes an effort to cut spending and reduce the deficit.

Libyans - Do we really want to help them?

The world's response to the Libya conflict has been inadequate at best and laughable at the worst. We have a real chance of getting rid off one tyrant and for the most part we are sitting on our hands. Everyone seems to agree that Gaddafi is a bad guy and needs to be removed but no one is really willing to do anything about.

The current effort in Libya is being limited to air strikes against Gaddafi's forces and various economic sanctions including an arms embargo. The first effort seems to be by and large used as a live fire training exercise for those air forces of the world that don't get to see action that often, like the Swedish Air Force which I believe is currently flying some of its first combat flights ever. This is helpful to the rebels in the sense that it makes harder for Gaddafi's forces to operate offensively, but it doesn't really help the rebels in taking Gaddafi's positions either.

In this age of high technology it is easy to focus on all the cool technical gadgets that for the most part are used by the air forces of the world and forget the fact that so far air power hasn't won a single war yet and taht in the end the ones who do put an end to a war are always infantrymen. The Second World War didn't end when the RAF bombed Berlin to ruins, but it sure as hell did when the foot soldiers of the Red Army put their flag over the Reichstag. Vietnam war is the ultimate example of the futility of bombing, more bombs were dropped on Vietnam than on Germany and Japan combined during WWII and still the Americans lost.

If we want to really help the rebels, we have two options, either send ground troops ourself to crush Gaddafi or help the rebels to become an effective fighting force in themselves. The first option requires us to think long and hard is getting rid of Gaddafi worth the blood, sweat and tears that a ground war eventually brings. Make no mistake in spite of all the technology we have fighting for the infantry man is as brutal as it ever was. Executing this option shouldn't be too hard. We have the EU Battlegroups that were, if I recall correctly, established to deal with stuff like this. But it seams that now that the moment has come to send our boys to fight and die, we hesitate.

The second option would be to send far limited number of people to train, equip and organize the rebels into more effective fighting units. This would require us to break the arms embargo that we have established and finding people to co-operate with amongst the rebels, because we sure as won't want to train some wannabe-Osama. This again might be more difficult than we think.

But whatever we do, we must deliberate the options carefully, make the decision that we think is the best and then see the thing through. If we want a ground war, then we must accept the fact that there will be body bags coming back from there. If we don't want a ground war we have to find alternative means to help rebels, if we even want to help them in the first place. But this sort willy nilly, lets try to eat the cake and save it at the same time mentality is not going to resolve this conflict, it will only prolong it. Unless Gaddafi is hit by a bomb, the current strategy of aerial bombing is only going to maintain the status quo, it will make Gaddafi too weak to crush the rebels, but not weak enough to be crushed by the rebels, making it impossible for either side to win.

Of humans and ideas

Now that Osama Bin Laden is dead what has really changed? Not much I suspect, because behind al-Qaida there is more than just a bogeyman with a long beard and turban, who occasionally speaks to the world through Al-Jazeera, behind al-Qaida is an idea and ideas are bullet and bomb proof.

The War on Terror is a War of Ideas and the battlefield is the soul of human kind. War on Terror won't be won with bullets or bombs, since as said before ideas are bullet and bomb proof, it will be over only when the people involved see the true horror behind absolute ideas. The horror that comes when someone who, thinks differently, dresses differently, believes differently, speaks a different language, then you do is made into an enemy, that can be killed, maimed, butchered at will solely because they are different. That is the fundamental difference between militant islamists like al-Qaida and the western ideas of humanity and freedom. In the West we live in a society that is based on the idea that the differences which we have are valuable to the wellbeing of the society, while in militant islam dissent from the official rules carry the penalty of death.

Terrorism in its essence is not designed to defeat you, but to get reaction out of you. The reactions to 9/11 were mostly counter-productive to the war of ideas. Abu Ghraib, renditions and Guantanamo are the most obvious violations of what the west has stood for so many years. We suffered a catastrophic defeat with all of these. Al-Qaida won because we flinched, we gave up some of our most treasured ideals, such as due process, right to a fair trial, bans on torture and inhuman treatment of prisoners. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the War on Terror, this means that some of the prisoners in Guantanamo have been imprisoned for ten years without being convicted of a crime. The fundamental pillar of our legal system is that you have to commit a crime and be found guilty of it in a fair and open trial before you are imprisoned. We take a giant leap forward in the war of ideas on the day that suspects of terrorism are no longer sent to rot in some military base, but brought into trial in open court like any other criminal would.

Living up to the ideals of the West is not easy. You have to tolerate things that you find offensive. You have to live knowing that some day someone will take advantage of the fact that the police doesn't arbitrarily strip search people one the streets to harm you. That is the price of freedom. On the day that our governments find it more important to stand up to the ideals that our societies are built than to provide security, that is the day when al-Qaida will never win the war of ideas. We will on the day when you can walk proudly on the streets, thinking what you will, speaking what you want to say, believing what you want to believe, wearing the clothes of your own choosing regardless of what some extremist might do to you. It is up to you and no one else.

The Greatest Human Inventions

Inspired by a friend, my top list of inventions that changed the world in noparticular order

1) Domestification of certain species of animals and plants, life becomes a whole hell of a lot easier when you don't have to every day spend hours running after some animal or looking for and collecting plants. Farming and animal husbandry revolutionized the way we humans feed ourselves, both are vastly more effient than hunting and gathering they replaced. This allowed a farmer to produce
more food beyond the needs off his immediate family to feed others. This in turn allowed people to engage in activities that were not directly related food production, like art, philosophy and governance.

2)Currency aka money, gave humanity the ability determine the comparative values of various goods, helping to smooth out the inherant inefficiencies in barter trade. Money helped to further labour specialization that agriculture started, now people had the ability to trade goods and service against a single universally accepted commodity, that they could later use to acquire goods and services that they themselves needed.

3)Writing, the ability to store information with symbols wasn't invented by poets or great story tellers, it was done by accountants and tax collectors. When you need to remember a vast amount of information using symbols to describe ideas and words is an invention you are going to need pretty quickly. This started the first information revolution in human history.

4)Magna Carta clause 29 "NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right"

This is one of the first human rights statements written down, which is so fundamental that people rarely remember it anymore; the idea that no one can be imprisoned if they haven't broken a law and convicted by a court. If you are not convinced, think of this why do oppressive regimes bother with making laws to oppress instead of just throwing people in jail?

5)The ability to send signals with electric signals, starting from the a simple telegraph and ending with the internet. Electric signaling started the third infomation revolution( the second one was the printing press), now information is no longer stored as symbols on a paper but digitally.

The Food Cops

Just finished watching Food Inc., a movie that everyone should definately see. What the film has to tell was pretty alarming, I won't go through all of the things in it, that would take too much time to write. What scared me the most was GMOs or genetically modified organisms and Monsanto.

What scared about GMOs wasn't the health issues related to it, because all food we eat has been genetically modified over millienia of selective breeding to yield bigger and larger crops or grow into bigger food animals. The only thing that has changed in the past fifty or so years is that this process has been more efficient through the use of genetics. What worries me are the legal ramifications of GMOs.

When a company like Monsanto develops a GMO plant it acquires the intellectual property rights to the genetic code that they have modified. This means that Monsanto owns the newly created plant or animal. Let me repeat that, they can claim ownership to entire species of plants and animals and that is absolute bullshit. How on earth can we allow a single corporation to claim ownership to an entire species of animal or plant that we depend on for sustenance? It blows my mind. If I were God, the creator all pigs and cows, I would get medieval on their asses or better yet sue the everliving crap out of them for patent infringement.

Some of the legal ramifications of this include, farmers not being allowed to save seed to plant in next year(To Monsanto this is copyright infringement), which sort what the farmers have been doing ever since there have been farmers, Monsate having their own little police force to watch that the farmers comply with don't save the seed policy, Monsanto suing farmers who's non-GMO crops were polynated by their neighbours GMO crops. For fucks sake. Thankfully the EU has made a pretty firm stand against the GMO madness and hopefully the keep it up.

While we are on the topic of food, there was another interesting documentary on Finnish TV, Väärennetty Ruoka or Forgery Foods in English, which discussed industrial food production and food engineering. Examples of food forgeries included the basil flavoured chicken that had spinach in it and the non-milk cream that had milk in it.

Its pretty interesting to see what actually goes into food, all the chemicals aside, the raspberry-peach yogurth I am currently eating also appears to contain modified potato starch, which I found oddly interesting, since now I am eating a raspberry-peach-potato yogurth. What a facinating age we live in.

Will we be seeing a January effect this year?

This post has been long due and its someting different from the usual. I was written by a very good friend of mine, but since I have the attention span of a slightly stunned and confused teletubby, the whole thing slipped my mind, for that I owe him a huge apology and a create of Heineken, Sorry Tammo, this completely slipped my mind and I appreciate your effort. Plus the text you made is awesome. But now we give the stage to Tammo:

“Sell in May, then go away”, “buy at the beginning of the month” or “ride the pre-holiday rally”; a few sayings that we keep hearing about. Out of all the existing stock seasonalities and anomalies though, the January effect must be the most well known, and perhaps the most talked about seasonal pattern. This effect, also often referred to as the “turn of the year” effect, has shown its prevalence in stock markets across the world over the last century, but what exactly causes this stock pricing anomaly, and what are the odds that we will be seeing it again this year?

A little history about the January effect: it had first been observed by Wachtel in 1942. He has written about the anomaly in his journal titled “Certain observations on seasonal movements in stock prices”, where he used data from the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the period of 1927 to 1942. Later research has shown an average increase of about 3.5 % in a customized NYSE stock portfolio in January during the period of 1904 to 1974, while all other months averaged 0.5 % to 1 %.

Ever since that publication many other academics have researched the effect and written about it. Interesting fact is that, up to this point, almost 70 years later after the publication of the journal, there is not yet a general consensus as to what causes this effect. One thing is being agreed on, though, which is that this effect mostly occurs in small-cap stocks (firms with a small equity capitalization). This effect isn’t exclusive to the equity markets, however; it’s also been observed in other asset classes such as the real estate investment trusts (REITs), securitized mortgages, municipal bond closed-end funds and the corporate bond market. 

Returning to the potential main cause of this seasonal pattern, most researchers are comfortable with believing that this effect is due to fiscal reasons. Academics hypothesize that many large institutional investors would drop their bad performing stocks, and use the losses for a tax write off. This would be in line with another argument that many theorists bring forward, which is that portfolio managers at large institutional investment companies would liquidate their losing stocks in order to enhance their portfolio position at the end of the year, as this is what they are being evaluated on and compensated for accordingly, which is basically a form of window dressing. They would purchase the same stocks in the year following, which would explain the rally in these stocks. A third argument sometimes brought up is that the rally in January is caused by the release of the many of financial statements by many different companies. 

Which argument should we believe to cause this effect? Every aforementioned potential cause of the seasonal pattern has some strong counterarguments. To start with the fiscal hypothesis, the January effect has been observed in many markets across the world. How can the effect still occur in Australia when taxes are levied in June instead of in January, or on April 1^st, as in Great Britain? There aren’t even any relevant taxes levied in Japan, while the effect still occurs on the equity market there as well. Furthermore, some studies show that the rebalancing of portfolios by investment managers does not explain the January effect. And finally, if stocks rise in January due to the large number of financial statements being released, why don’t stocks appreciate by the same amount in the months of June and September, when a similar amount of financial statements is being released?

While it’s unsure what exactly causes the effect ,it may be more relevant to know if the effect will show again, in order to partake and ride the rally. Unfortunately, the effect is occurring fewer these years. This is said to be due to an increase of the global interrelation of financial markets. So, to answer the question in the title, “Will we be seeing a January effect this year?”, the chances are lower nowadays that we will this year. However, checking small cap indices such as for example the Dutch Amsterdam Small cap Index (AScX) here in the Netherlands every now and then certainly couldn’t hurt.

By Tammo Vastenburg