March 31, 2010

Today's excursion was to the stadthaus with the mission to become Swiss. After a long session in the waiting room, see picture above, the mission has temporary failed as a paper was missing to prove that I lived elsewhere in Switzerland before moving to Zürich. It is quite amazing how little big-brother society Switzerland is compared to Sweden where every citizen has a personal number that will tell you everything about what you have ever done in your life, where you have lived, what you have studied, how big is your debt, what DVD's you have rented and so on.

It is still going well for Berlusconi in Italy, in the regional elections a few days ago his alliance were doing well. It is such a mystery why people keep voting for this man that is accused of bribery, connections to the mafia and is the center of scandal after scandal. Is it due to lack of decent alternatives or is it really because people are so manipulated by the media that are mainly owned and controlled by Berlusconi. An Italian, immigrated to Sweden, Erik Gandini, has done a documentary about the Italian "TV revolution" that Berlusconi has created. The film is called Videocracy and was shown on Swedish national TV last night. Unfortunately I couldn't see it as I live in Switzerland but hopefully it will come to the Swiss cinemas soon. People have different opinions on the quality of the film but apparently not about its message. The film was presented at the film festival in Venice but the trailer was censured and its content was not allowed to be displayed in the festival program. What follows is long series of incidents indicating the total lack of freedom of press in Italy. Even though you don't risk prison in Italy for what you write you risk your to loose your job and reputation if you criticize "the king". However, outside of former Soviet Union Italy now has the largest movement for press freedom so I guess there is still some hope.

If you want to watch the trailer of Videocracy that was banned you can find it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9AXQGGkgK8

Anyway, the question remains, is the reason for Berlusconis success indeed an intense media manipulation or is it as simply as Churchill says (and frequently quoted in my favorite series West Wing): The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.

March 24, 2010

Time changes quickly and now spring is finally here! Zürich had a superb day with sun and 20°C. What could be better than a picnic at my favorite place by the Limmat, I will not tell you exactly where it is those because one of its charms is that there are not so many people there.

Barack Obama finally managed to get his health care reform through the congress. From a European perspective it is difficult to understand why it was so hard to get the proposition accepted. For us the access to health care is a fundamental right that could never be questioned and this new reform still doesn't include all Americans, just 95% of them. Why are all the republicans against this solidarity towards the weaker? They want people to have the freedom to chose for themselves but to chose whether to have a health insurance or to feed your family is not a real freedom. Another crazy issue that is now being resolved is that chronically ill people now cannot be denied a health insurance. All that I can say about this is: Congratulations Americans, you have won more than you might realize! Just a shame that Obama had to negotiate with the pro-life people to get it through but sometimes you have to make compromises for the common good.

In Switzerland the new vision for the railway system, Bahn 2030, was presented. More and longer trains are planned to cope with the increasing number of passengers. The Swiss railway system is really magnificent and must be one of the best in the world and they are continuously working on improving it. However, the cost of the improvements will of course be taken from the passengers so let's hope that the increased cost is not big enough to discourage people from taking the train. For a family taking the train is already a real luxury and if the goal is to reduce the car traffic and pollution rising the prices will go in exactly the opposite direction.

Sweden has a lot of things to learn from Switzerland on this matter. During the winter months the railways have been a disaster, I think I heard somewhere that about 30% of all the trains were canceled. It is incredibly embarrassing for a country where the snow and cold doesn't exactly come as a surprise.

March 17, 2010

View over Central with the university and ETHZ in the background taken from the bus 46 bus stop in front of the station. I totally forgot everything about photos today so a quick photo with my mobile (Nexus One) had to do the trick. The winter seems to finally start giving in to spring in Zürich and even though the morning was freezing the afternoon was really nice and warm.

It has now been a court decision in the US that the government will not pay money to parents who claim that a preservative in vaccines have triggered autism in their children. The court ruled against the parents since there are no scientific proofs what so ever that autism can be triggered by vaccines. This is just a myth that was created as a scientific had manipulated data that created an apparent link between vaccine and autism. It is quite chocking to see how this myth has gained influence and many parents refuse to vaccinate their children against the diseases that was nearly extinguished but now are coming back in regular outbreaks. As a parent in Switzerland you often hear about this myth and it is no longer considered obvious to vaccinate your children. The vaccination rate in Switzerland against the measles is as low as 87%.

One example of this phenomenon are the measles epidemics that as late as in 2009 killed an unvaccinated child in Switzerland. These epidemics mainly hits the Rudolf-Steiner (Waldorf education) schools where parents are discouraged to vaccinate their children against a number of potentially deadly diseases and encouraging the parents not to worry about whether the children will dies because if they do, it was probably their destiny.

Another example of huge skepticism against vaccinations could be seen during the swine flu hype. Whereas the Swedes were queuing for hours and fighting to get the vaccines, the Swiss only used a tiny portion of the vaccines bought by the government and finished by passing them all on to poorer countries. Now, the swine flu never really got the serious outbreak that we all feared so the consequences of the vaccination refusal didn't get so serious but who knows what will happen next time.

March 10, 2010

By the Limmat at Unter-Letten. We all got some spring feelings last week but this week they are all gone, the snow is back together with an icy cold wind.

Monday 8'th of March was the international women's day. It didn't get so much coverage in Swiss media but more in the Swedish, wonder if that is somehow significant of the women's roles in the different societies? Anyway, one of this years themes was maternal mortality. This is luckily no longer a problem in our part of the world where we over the last 100 years managed to get the mortality rate down to quasi zero. Today 99% of the deaths related to childbirth is in the developing countries where out of 100'000 pregnancies over 1000 finish in death for the woman compared to 7 in Switzerland. One of the worst countries is Niger where every 7'th woman dies due to pregnancy related complications. Apart from not having access to proper health-care a part of these deaths are related to illegal abortions and female genital mutilation. Another part is also related to the low age of the mothers forced into marriage as adolescents, in many countries in Africa maternal mortality is the primary cause of death for women between 15 and 19 years old.

When I consider the childbirth experiences of my own friends, I would estimate that two of them would definetely have died 100 years ago or if they were living in Afghanistan. One or two would have had life-threatening conditions. Living in the "right place at the right time" they could all go home from the hospitals with healthy babies four days later.

March 3, 2010

The ice-skating rink at Heuried, Zürich Kreis 3. For a short while we thought that spring was finally releasing us from this terribly long winter but we were not that lucky.


This picture was actually taken yesterday from my office. We have been fortunate to have the opportunity of following the mounting of a building from very close. Building the foundation of this building was very long but now they are putting it together in an IKEA-like manner with an amazing speed. The building seems to grow one floor every day. At least the workers here don't need to ask themselves at the end of the days what the have actually achieved.

Apple is filing a lawsuit against HTC mainly due to their operative system, Android. Indirectly this is a lawsuit against Google. It will be interesting to see where this will lead in the long run. Apple must of course feel threatened that so many phone manufacturers chose Android. If Apple will win it will be very nasty for many mobile companies but I guess they will not cede without a fight and sue Apple back if necessary. This will probably be a long and nasty story.

February 24, 2010

Graffiti at Letten along the Limmat, this is somewhat a free zone for graffiti artist of varying quality but some of them really stand out from the crowd.

Once again Libya is on the headlines. One of Gaddafis Swiss hostages was liberated and could return home whereas the other was thrown into prison for another 4 months. The plot thickens as Gaddafi himself declares a jihad against Switzerland because of the minaret voting. Luckily for Switzerland Gaddafi doesn't have much more credibility among Islamic fundamentalist than he has in the rest of the world so there is still some hope that we will not get a band of suicide bombers on our necks. Even for a dictatorship it is amazing that that a person can remain in power that changes his mind as often as the journalist changes the spelling of his name (Khaddafi, Khadafy, Ghadafi, Gadafy in numerous variations). The only hope for the Swiss hostage seems to unexpectedly come from the person who put him in the situation in the first place, Ghaddafis son Hannibal. The conflict with Switzerland started as the Swiss police was intervening as Hannibal beat up his staff during a stay in Geneva. I guess that you can not count on the good heart of Hannibal but maybe he has got some more brains left than his aging father and therefore sees some advantages of not pissing off the entire international community.