Even before the pandemic, the number of ways the world is broken would have justified a moderate depression, but now things seem utterly unbearable. I was about to start writing a piece on how the evolution of the software depressed me, when some current events disconcerted me even more.

The things that bother me include, in no particular order:

  1. Lukashenko’s act of piracy. This fucking stupid, impotent, and spineless West didn’t move a finger to bother Gaddafi after the Lockerbie bombing, and we’re expected to believe that the Sovietic EU and its member countries will do something relevant when an aircraft is hijacked? Redirecting the flights to avoid Belarus is merely a safety procedure. Lukashenko is a dictator who has never been under any real pressure from the “international community”; and since I just invoked Gaddafi, let’s also list a few famous recipients of the French Légion d’honneur: Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Vladimir Putin, Harvey Weinstein. Let’s however not forget how the EU landed the Bolivian president’s plane in Vienna in 2013 amid suspicions of Edward Snowden on board (but the trend was started by France in Algeria in 1956). And how the EU and the US have sanctioned several high-ranking Russian officials over the poisoning of Navalny, despite not having had organized any legal process and without any proofs that the respective officials have ordered such a thing. But how can we expect the EU or NATO to sanction this state-sponsored piracy when they did nothing when Turkish military vessels aggressed Greek or Italian civilian ships? And when they never fixed the anomaly called Northern Cyprus?
  2. The management of the COVID-19 crisis, worldwide, has been abysmally pathetic. What are those politicians good at, and what are they paid for? The taxes for mere mortals are huge, if you count them all, VAT included. Life is never going to return to “the old normal”!
  3. Scientists, physicians, virologists, epidemiologists, all have proven their incompetence, were it only from the way they contradicted one another, or even the way they adopted diametrically opposed views after a while. Unlike economics, medicine was supposed to be a science. Maybe it still is, but who can one still trust? Beyond the conflict of interests of some individuals and of Big Pharma, there’s only one word: incompetence. Stupidity, if you like it better.
  4. The EU is more than ever a bureaucratic burden instead of being of any use. I always said that this USSR-like construct wasn’t needed in order to ensure the free movement of people, merchandise, and money. (Merchandise-wise, Turkey being in the EEA, they only need visas for their people.) The most socialist (if not even communist) principle of the EU is “give your money to us, and instead of letting you sponsor your national infrastructure, agriculture, digital economy, culture, etc., it’s up to us to decide who deserves such funding.” Looks like Moscow in the Soviet times, only it’s Brussels. So a country can’t provide aids for a national aeronautic company, but the EU can sponsor random businesses such as a private dental clinic in Romania and a small software development company in Germany (not open-source, but commercial products!), in both cases with over a million of euros, for it counts as “regional development.” It counts as pan-European Mafia to me. The lack of legitimacy of the EU institution isn’t “populism” but reality: even if the European MEPs are indeed elected, the European Parliament cannot initiate laws, they can only amend what the European Commission presents them with. And either way, it looks like the most imbecile individuals are getting jobs at Brussels, for the citizens of Europe aren’t aware of the importance of who they’re sending there! Brussels is the epitome of a supra-national Mafia that abolishes national sovereignty. Take the recent case of Poland, who was ordered by the ECJ to close some coal mines; Poland said no, because it’s their sovereign right to do so. But the EU managed to do more than Hitler and Stalin with their tanks: to subjugate an entire continent of formerly free nations! As for how and why a unique currency can only lead to disaster, there are smart economists who know the answer. But apparently, our only hope stays in those “populists” who might trigger one day a Frexit, an Italxit, and so on.
  5. To the point, neither the EU, nor the German Bundesregierung could provide me a COVID-19 vaccine. I do want to get vaccinated, with all the risks, but there’s none for me: I’m not old enough. What are those morons paid for with taxpayers’ money? They’re not needed, they should fucking go grow potatoes instead of acting as our masters!
  6. A small example of poor communication: the second jab (the booster dose, le rappel) usually have more severe side effects than the initial dose, yet the articles deemed to explain this fact (e.g. here or here) left out one question: if a person feels like shit after the booster, does it mean that the same person would have had very severe COVID-19 symptoms if hit by the actual virus? If that were true, i.e. if severe side effects on the booster jab mean you would probably have died if infected while non-vaccinated, this should have been used as an argument to persuade the denialists, but nobody used this argument! Conversely, if the severe side effects of the second jab have a totally different meaning, what is it? Should the booster jab be delayed e.g. at 12-16 weeks instead of 8 weeks? I never feared the vaccine, but now I do, merely because I cannot trust their half-explanations about the strange reactions to the booster! To make it clear that they simply fucking don’t know anything about anything, here’s a claim that further boosters (a third dose) wouldn’t probably cause worse side effects. Yeah, pretty persuasive, as for the scientific base…
  7. The mass idiocy, aggravated by the social networks. I knew masses were stupid, and they could only get more and more stupid over time. Nonetheless, the speed with which this mass idiocy has been aggravated by the social networks and by the ability of such networks to spread even the most absurd falsehoods and conspiracies is abysmal! Even educated and intelligent people now seem mentally retarded! I never felt so bad among my fellow humans. Stop this planet, I want to get out!
  8. Dictatorship does exist, just not the way most people see it. The entire lockdown story wasn’t a hidden attempt to establish a fascist dictatorship on Earth. It was meant to contain a virus, but it was pathetically implemented. But while a true, complete lockdown was never in place in Western countries, the curfews were dictatorial; the “self-certifications” used in countries such as Italy, France, Romania were dictatorial; the fact that, as I write this, I cannot go to a non-food store without having a daily test is dictatorial. With genuine or false tests, people go to restaurants and cafés, and they travel like stupid rats all around the globe (if people hate their own country that much, why are they still living there?), but I refuse to get tested for a simple visit to a department store!
  9. Political correctness now reached the heights of the Cancel Culture (and woke), and of the “toxic white masculinity” everywhere. One more time, to which planet should I go? I can’t even think of how absurd these times are! They want to delete the past, to rewrite it, to pull down statues, to rewrite even the history of art, because “blacks aren’t represented enough” and also “white people should be ashamed that they’re white”! The discrimination of the white people will soon become legal! Let’s not forget that the discrimination against males is already legislated in many EU countries, where there are mandatory quotas for women on the boards of companies and of public bodies, in politics, etc. One doesn’t have to have the required skills and competencies, but to be a woman! Being a black lesbian would be a plus.
  10. LGBTQI+ with added “let your kids change their sex” propaganda. It wasn’t enough that the queers of this planet just can’t keep to themselves their sexual preferences and habits. Now they invented the “gender theory” that says your biological sex and your “mental” sex (called gender) are not identical. Not only that, but people should be able to change their biological sex as soon as they “feel uneasy” with their person, even at the age of four! Just look at the various documentaries and other shit showing kids of 7 or 8 years old who say “when I was 4, I told my mummy I feel I’m a girl, not a boy”! In normal times, that would be diagnosed for what it is: a mental illness. Nowadays, it’s a crime not to be supportive of such aberrant behavior! There are two things they never thought of, though. The first one: it’s them, the gay people who said, “we’re not committing a crime, and this is not an illness, but a choice: we chose to prefer our sex over the opposite one”; but now they feel offended if their gayness is called a choice”! They’re now drama queens wanting us to consider their sexual preference as predetermined! But if it’s congenital, how is it not a disease? You know, people can be born with heart defects, with a predisposition to diabetes, etc. etc., and, why not, to “unnatural” sexual preferences! The latest fad is not anymore to say, “I’m a gay man,” but “I want to change my sex to become a woman, so that men could fuck me in my pussy”! The second thing is that, if mandatory quotas are introduced for women (as opposed to men), how come “the other 58 genders” aren’t asking a mandatory quota for each of them? And how could such a quota be calculated? Is being “non-binary” a choice, or a predestination?
  11. Bitcoin. Since the tulipmania I haven’t seen such a mass idiocy. I don’t have enough place here to elaborate, but it’s a nightmare to see how “finance experts” are praising it!
  12. The technological Gods, primarily Elon Musk. Too many people cannot see Elon Musk for what he is: an arrogant charlatan. Incompetent engineers failed to say that the promised hyperloop is not feasible, unless the passengers want to die at the slightest malfunction. Just like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk is a billionaire for one good idea he once had (one idea: PayPal!), but then he capitalized by being bold and doing and saying whatever he felt like. Chief manipulator, nothing more. And now he wants to own the extraterrestrial space too!
  13. Technologies taken for Gods. People don’t understand the Blockchain technology, yet they praise it. They don’t understand that quantum computers couldn’t perform the same tasks as the current ones, who need precision, not statistical randomness. The poor lemmings have new Gods.
  14. Greta Thunberg, the CO2 obsession, and the electric cars. I don’t deny that there is a climate change, because everything changes. We were 1 billion in 1800, 2.5 billion in 1950, almost 8 billion now. Large urban concentrations generate heat. The huge consumption of unnecessary products that nonetheless need to be manufactured generates heat. And I mean heat, not CO2. The CO2 isn’t a pollutant, it’s a natural component! A 2008 report of the U.S. Department of Energy sums it up well: the atmosphere holds 800 GT of CO2, of which photosynthesis removes about 120 GT, but then the decomposition of biological material and respiration from plants and soil microbes return 120 GT of carbon; each year the oceans absorb and release about 90 GT of carbon (phytoplankton photosynthesis absorbs CO2, but microbial respiration and decomposition return the same amount of CO2; human activities (primarily fossil fuel use) only emit about 9 GT of CO2 each year, of which only 4 GT remain in the atmosphere, as 3 GT are taken up by natural terrestrial processes, and another 2 GT are removed by the ocean. As a side note, the soil holds 2300 GT, the fossil pool 10,000 GT, the deep ocean 37,000 GT, the reactive sediments 6000 GT, and again, the atmosphere holds 800 GT CO2, with an annual increase of 4 GT, or 0.5%. So the post-apocalyptic scenarios are bullshit. The entire planet is in hysterical mode. I wouldn’t insist how there seems to be a cooling trend for some time, or how intelligent scientists are censored and “the 98% consensus” is an atrocious fabrication. But by no means could a stupid teenager who skipped classes because she was depressed and with Asperger’s be smarter than the rest of the planet! How could so many people bow before Greta Thunberg as if she were some genius?! The Maid of Orleans, only she’s from Stockholm this time. Another reality: there’s real pollution beyond the CO2-mania. NOx and PM2.5/PM10 are among those that could give people asthma or lung cancer. And electric cars won’t solve that, because an electric car has about a ton of batteries and produces more PM2.5/PM10 from the friction tires-pavement than a modest normal car! Finally, the gradual banning of combustion engine cars is purely dictatorial, and unprecedentedly so!
  15. China rules us all. Not only we’re so stupid as to have an economic model that can only survive when there’s an ever-increasing consumption, but we moved most of our manufacturing to China. Whatever is counted as China’s part in the global GDP is fake: when something leaves China at $1 but is sold in the West for $10, somehow the West’s GDP is credited with $9 for nothing, as the actual value has been created in China! So yes, China rules us, and its expansionism will only worsen the situation. When some stupid Western capitalists are deluding themselves to believe they “conquered a share of the Chinese market”: what happens is that the Daimler and BMW factories in China give jobs to the Chinese, not to Westerners! In the near future, Europe will become a dusty vintage holiday destination for the Chinese…

There are so many other reasons for despair, but I had to stop somewhere. At the beginning of 2020, Forbes ran this article: 2020 Will Bring A New Renaissance: Humanity Over Technology. What followed is the exact opposite: we got to isolate from one another, and rely on Zoom, Teams, Skype and the likes for “human” interaction. There are millions of YouTube channels in which narcissistic, overconfident people who don’t have anything valuable to say, use the platform as a video journal, and there are countless idiots who watch their videos! Incredible amounts of digital garbage made possible by the “free” offerings of our digital masters (mainly Google and Facebook). Our dependency of technology, and of buggy, overcomplex software, is unprecedented. As if it weren’t enough technostress already. Suicides in Guyana are on rise since the end-1980s, and teenagers 12 to 14 are now the most affected, for the simple reason the Amerindians couldn’t cope with the hiatus between the traditional life and the hypertechnologized one imposed to them by the “civilization.” But hey, brainwashed shitheads are praising the blockchain technology that would “enable the entire economy to grow with a factor of 10, or even 100,” by economy meaning “a multi-trillion dollar market” of nothing: nothing that people actually need! Also, some believe we need to be “turning vehicles into moving theme parks,” because this is what cars are made for, right?

Given the context, the annoyances I had the other day with specific IT developments seem marginal. When there is so much idiocy everywhere, by what miracle would software be spared of it? After so many decades of having used so many generations of IT technologies, I have a better view than the latest idiot who’s a guru in some stupid software development framework invented yesterday and obsolete tomorrow.

Here’s a couple of happy future Web developers, according to Spiced Education GmbH, aka Spiced Academy. Are they on meth? How could this planet even survive without Node.js, Vue.js and React?

And yet, beyond books, comic strips, music and movies, some people find refuge in software. Not games in my case. Life goes on, but I wanted to say that I understand of those who are suicidal, or who try to go to some isolated, godforsaken place. The problem is that such places don’t exist anymore.