First, I should derail the entire thing by mentioning that I have actually already experienced one independence day celebration this year, and that was here in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn: The Norwegian independence day. Usually, the Scandinavians stick together here, but since the Norwegians got their independence from the Danes, I thought I would keep a low profile that day.

Right, back to the topic. What I actually wanted to say is that I find it remarkable that practically every household thing here is made outside of the US. So, the United States are celebrating the independence from the United Kingdom, but the States are in fact tremendously dependent on a lot of supplier countries.
This is remarkable in some ways. If, for one thing, we compare to the invasion of Iraq – something which people even now say is not about oil, but seriously: If it was an effort to stop a regime of oppression, then there is no end of questions to ask; I vould, for instance, ask: What about Yemen? A colorful place in Human Rights debates. Just a random question. And if we are talking about oppression, and getting into just the most superficial definition of that, I would think sweatshops would be somewhat relevant to discuss under that category. I do understand that China is a bit of a mouthful to be policing with military, but we have a very close tie with China. And for a place talking so much about democracy, human rights and freedom, you would wonder about all these Chinese products here. You know how people talk about voting with your feet, spending the dollar where it will buy the rights you are fighting for? I would say that someone speaking about rights and democracy wearing Chinese-made clothes are about as impressive as fur-wearing animal activists. And how many computers are actually made without a Chinese component?

Now, you could say that this is a resource issue, but it obviously is not. If, like me, you grew up in Denmark, a tiny country with few natural resources, this might be a partially valid argument, but this is the United States of America, and I doubt that there are any resources that could not be sourced here.
I mentioned the question on Identi.ca, and Jeff Ratcliff pointed me towards the MadeInUsa.org website. Actually, in the beginning I was thinking about doing a “US patriot product” type of marketing thing, and I see that some products like American Apparel go into that. But as I was looking into it, I gradually began wondering how much the US has actually sold off.
There are disclaimers on this one: I live in New York, which is obviously a place with a concentration of the country’s white-collar work, so there isn’t much in the way of physical production here, just some secondary and a lot of tertiary production. That may be skewing my impression.
Also, and this seems a bit silly, but: I may be taking the offical lingo too seriously. It seems reasonable that the patriotic statements are a stylized picture of the state of the nation, and going to war doesn’t work as well if you state that it is a war for practical purposes. The United States have been in a curious position in the last years after the 9/11 attack (no, I am not going to go into conspiracy theories; if this has your interest, watch the first Zeitgeist movie), because they had never been attacked directly, all the wars had been conducted off-continent. And so, 20th century-methods were applied to a 21st century challenge – a challenge called terrorism which, one might add, still has a considerably smaller loss of life than obesity and bad living conditions in countries like, say, China, Thailand and other places which make our daily products. Sweatshops are not there to further economic development, and anyone who says so is lying to someone.

Does all this make me sound like a hippie? I was a left-winger once,  but these things have lost their meaning as I got older. What I certainly can say is that the US is nothing remotely close to independent, and there is a lot of hipocrisy about the values behind policies and corporate actions. Perhaps there is just less hipocrisy in those who support predatory capitalism, since that is what happens when everybody turns a blind eye.

On a different note, a personal comment -
Talking about independence, it also seems relevant to talk about those you depend on, and those who depend on you!
I moved to the US in December, and I have come to appreciate it. I was looking for work for a long time, and this spring I finally got employed at the Danish-American Chamber of Commerce, an interesting networking group for companies interested in working and investing between the two countries, and recently also at Miller Rosenfalck NY, the New York branch of a London law firm specialised in internation law for American companies getting established in Europe and vice versa.

When we came here, I was registered as my wife’s dependent – a bit hard to swallow, as I left my job in Denmark to come here – but now I am earning money for the household as well, which is a tremendous relief to me. While I have no doubt that my wife’s job has been made easier by me being able to help with the house and our son – making the conecpt of the dependent a bit floating – it is good to balance it out.
My wife is pregnant again, and we are expecting a second child in december.
Considering the family and the independence one would have without it – and that is my personal thought today – there are some ways of giving up independence that make life better. Some people like to say that nobody owns them, but I do need my wife and my son, and I have an obligation to them that make me theirs, as they are mine.
It is the heart that binds.

So – happy 4th of July. Enjoy your independence and the places where you have given it up for something greater.

I have used the word processor Abiword for quite a few years. Not a love-hate relationship, but it could perhaps be described as a love-frustration relationship. You probably know how it is – you have a lot of good features, but there is one thing you really need which you know from somewhere else, and which you don’t have or which doesn’t work with this particular program.

But frustration points – later. First, I will tell you why I appreciate Abiword so much. I am actually writing this in Abiword – like I was using LyX for that review. It is nice to have things visible in the interface you are using as you go along.

Abiword is a truly lightweight application. A wordprocessing application in a very small package. It is available on GNU/Linux, the BSD family and Windows – the latter with the option of getting the portable version, which you can install on a USB stick and take with you. It is licensed under the GNU GPL v2 and available on the Abiword download page.
The interface is what you would expect from such a program – a top roll-down menu, and two menus with standard formatting features – open, save, print, cut, paste and the like on one and styles, font type, size, alignment, indentation et cetera on the lower one. By default, Abiword gives you a horisontal and a vertical ruler, and I usually turn it off, but I leave it on here just for you! The rulers allow for setting indentation, tabs and margins visually.

This application may be small, but it has some of the features associated with heavier applications and larger projects. All of the features I used in my university papers would have been available, had I used Abiword (I used OpenOffice instead, which is also worth a recommendation, but – another time): Footnotes, endnotes, references, autogenerated table of contents and so forth.

At the same time it should be said that I have recommended Abiword to a lot of people I would expect to find Word and OpenOffice Writer overwhelming, and most people – including me, most of the time – don’t need the additional applications in an office suite like spreadsheets, presentation software, database management et cetera. I think that Abiword, while adding good features and stability along the way, still manages to have some very clear and intuitive dialogs, making it easy to work with – as you can see from these two examples. The Preferences window is equally straightforward.

Abiword has a file type of it’s own – .abw files and .awt for templates; it works as it is supposed to, but additional document filters are available; without adding any filters, it will save to Microsoft Word .doc format, (X)HTML, RTF and PDF – but with the added filters, Abiword can be a strong tool for opening files from old applications; sometimes you are stuck with an old Works or Wordperfect file – or OpenOffice.org, for that matter. There is also a very good OpenDocument-import-export filter, and it handles .docx files quite well – not 1:1, but certainly rendering them readable.
Abiword is available in quite a few languages; I have done the Danish translation.

Also – some elegant solutions.
One of the things I quite like is the way to modify styles. Now, this may require an introduction of you are not familiar with the concept. Styling a document is a way of making a uniform overall design for a document. I believe it is inspired by/borrowed/stolen from LaTeX, which is entirely based on the concept that you shouldn’t be setting font types and sizes, you should just be able to indicate what is a heading, what is regular text, what is a quotation et cetera. If you are acquainted with the stylesheets associated with webpages, you are familiar with the principle: If something of this type turns up, this is how it should look.

The example here is Block Text, which is an increased-margin style for emphasis – what you would use to quote an author, for instance. There is a preview of how the font looks, and how the text will look in a page. In the preview pane, the larger margins are apparent. It is also apparent that this style inherits the traits of the Normal style, which means that it is exactly like Normal, except for the areas where it has been changed, which is just the margins here. A style can pretty much contain the text fetures you want – though it should be mentioned that the modified styles are limited to the document you are working on, and if you want the styles to remain, you should modify them to the extent you wish and save that document as the default template.
I find that it is useful when working on a larger text to define these things from the start. If you have particular wishes for font types and sizes, it is quickly done, since the styles are based on each other, so a font change cascades into the styles based on it.
Styling as a concept also extends to places one might not expect it; it is possible to style things like foot- and endnotes, the table of contents and lists. Abiword does have sensible defaults, though.
Considering the complexity of styles as a concept, this interface is about as easy to use as it gets.

Another example of a good interface for a potentially difficult concept is the selection of tools to use with the tables. Inserting the table is straightforward, but I particularly find that the intuitiveness of the tools to merge and split cells are good; I have simply never seen it done so clearly before.



Going back to setting up the table of contents, this function is a list autogenerated by headlines, which again are essentially lines of text defined with the style Heading, indented as appropriate with Heading 1, Heading 2 et cetera for the various levels, as the text is divided into parts, chapters, sections, subsections and so on. You can select whether you want the heading to be numbered in the text or not – in an academic paper it is nice to have it appearing numbered with sections and subsections, but in a book text, it looks off.
As shown here, the TOC has a setup menu available in the Format menu or by right-clicking the table. It allows for defining what styles should be used – and the numbering scheme as well, which is a nice detail.

Recently, it has become possible to add comments to the text, which in Abiword is called annotations. They are not as clearly seen as in other word processing applications, they are either underscored or shown with a different color, but this also means that they do not interfere with reading the text. It is certainly nice to have as a feature. Also, it is useful when several people are working on a document that it can be clear who made the note.

A somewhat curiously implemented function is the ability to insert a data field. This a way to have some metainformation available without putting it all into the interface, but it is not always completely intuitive. The fields shown here are fairly straightforward, and you may want to put metadata like the author in a template for, say, a business letter. Some people like to have a field in the header or footer with “Page X of XX pages”, which I suppose is useful if you have a list or something where it is not immediately apparent from context if a page is missing.

It is also possible to use this to create merged mailing. If you have a letter template and a CSV data file with client addresses, Abiword will merge the two and create a printable Abiword file with the letters you want, and it can be used with envelopes – I suppose that you could use a table to create shipping labels, too.

Okay, so these were features I would like to present. A lot of good and useful stuff. Unfortunately, there are also a few things I have to mention that subtract a bit from the final score. I think of them as challenges.

Templates. Okay, not actually templates, because as you see, opening a new document based on a template is fairly straightforward, but template management is a challenge. If you look into the documentation you find out that the document you have can be saved as a template by saving it as an .awt in the user’s template folder. Now, I personally think this is a bit clunky – since the folder is constant and can be determined, there is no reason there should be any confusion here – a “Save as template” dialog where one could enter a name and brief description should be sufficient.

Secondly, Text breaks between sections are clever for things like having varying headers or footers between chapters. There is, however, no visual cue in the Abiword interface as to where there is a section break; and the sections are not numbered in the status bar like the pages are. So it is anybody’s guess where a section break is in the text, and if you insert one by accident, you may have a bit of a problem. I filed a bug report/request for enhancement about this on the Abiword Bugzilla.

Third, I mentioned the function to insert data fields. And some of the names are intuitive enough – “page number” and “author name” I can manage. But a field like “Military time”? “Document coverage”? “Page reference”? I mean, I recognise the words, but a small description would be handy.

Fourth, the help function is a bit random. When you access the help file, it opens an HTML file. This is not necessarily in the default browser, so if you have an editor set as the default HTML association, it will open there instead. This is a minor gripe – what is more important is that the structure and contenct of the Abiword help file is less than intuitive,  and the content is quite mixed. The screenshots in the help files are not exactly fresh and appealing.

A final note which is mostly just something to wonder about – Abiword indicates using Times New Roman by default. But I never understood how this actually works – I do not have that font on my system! I usually change it in the template to Liberation or DejaVu – two nice fonts with good Unicode support; but this Times New Roman thing always puzzles me.

Which brings me to my original comment. I have been writing up points in an attempt to overhaul the Abiword Help function – to add some instructions and put them in usable categories. And as it was coming together, I thought it was a good opportunity to write a general introduction to Abiword.

To be fair, my old gripes with Abiword are mostly things of the past. The application was quite unstable for some time – one of my Abiword breaks – and that seems to be over. It used to be tied into some dependencies which made it quite cumbersome to install on Slackware, and that is no longer relevant.

And as for the Help files, well – maybe that really should be a community task, shouldn’t it? The programmers are able and ready, and the mailing lists are very responsive. There is no doubt that there is an active and appreciate community, which I am pleased and proud to be a part of. And so, I try to reset the Help interface – not building on the existing one if I can help it, but simply redoing it and trying to facelift it a bit.

The Symphony of Science project is a creative effort to promote the interest in or, perhaps more precisely, the fascination with science.
The project has taken old scientific educational TV programs and put them through Auto-Tune, a software application for adjusting voice recording. Mashing them up with music, the musings of Carl Sagan, Richard P. Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye form a tapestry of quotations which are presented lovingly, in a tribute to scientific research, experimentation and debate.

What makes this work so well is partly that the enthusiasm of the featured scientists and people behind the project is very real, partly that this kind of science is poetic in its very nature.

Carl Sagan in particular has a talent for putting it in poetic terms:

The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths
Of exquisite interrelationships
Of the awesome machinery of nature

I believe our future depends powerfully
On how well we understand this cosmos
In which we float like a mote of dust
In the morning sky

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean
Recently we’ve waded a little way out
And the water seems inviting

Is this not beautiful? These people seem almost bold in their willingness to tackle the thought of infinity of space and time, stubbornly insistant in asking how long this reality has existed and tackling, well, creation.

A fascinating passage by Neil deGrasse Tyson:

We are all connected;
To each other, biologically
To the earth, chemically
To the rest of the universe atomically

- and his devotion to the question and his insistance that this must be of real interest to every human out there:

I know that the molecules in my body are traceable
To phenomena in the cosmos
That makes me want to grab people in the street
And say, have you heard this??

Scientists of this kind are always getting harsh words for the way they try to zoom the microscope, provide the full explanation, which to some means taking the poetry out of the elements in nature – the sunrise, the stars, light and darkness, the world, the life that surrounds us. But the scientists insist on the beauty and the fascinating nature of it all.
Again, Sagan on the artful construction of natural reality:

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it
But the way those atoms are put together
The cosmos is also within us
We’re made of star stuff
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself

My last quote shall be by Richard Dawkins, who puts it like this:

There’s real poetry in the real world
Science is the poetry of reality

In my life, I am immersed in technology and development. We are all working on progress within the things we devote our lives to.
But I must admit that these musical scientific mashups -  along with the fact that I am currently reading Surely you’re joking, mr. Feynman!, the autobiography of Richard P. Feynman – have infused me with an enthusiasm towards the inquisitive, the appreciation of looking at the world around us and taking it in.

I leave you for now with the video I have begun listening to at the beginning of every day. Fascinating.

Declared foundation of the Russian liberation movement:
Proponent angle

A large group of Soviet soldiers wanted to fight for the liberation of Russia or the nations of the Soviet Union from the existing system lead by Iosif Stalin.
An opportunity to achieve this goal was presented with the German invasion. In June 1942, leaflets encouraging Soviet soldiers to lay down their arms and welcome Adolf Hitler as the liberator were dropped at the front and in the areas being occupied. As a counter-move, the Soviet leadership attempted to paint a picture of the German as an evil enemy – the Germans, who were allies a short time ago. As Soviet citizens were accustomed to reading between the lines in the official statements, this campaign made little impression on the population. Part of the Soviet soldiers and civilians had had contact with Germans in the 1st World War and could not match their personal impression with the one offered in official publications.
Also, this alliance gone sour produced another alliance with the former (and later) arch enemies Great Britain and USA. This strengthened the impression that the priorities of the Soviet leadership were not in reality what they were officially.
And so, there was an interest in an alliance with the German state. This because it was impossible to imagine that it could be the intention of German leadership to conquer and continually occupy all of the Soviet Union, due to its massive size – not to mention the experience with the Russian geography done by Napoleon. Ergo, it would be in the interest of Nazi Germany to cooperate with a group interested in creating an alliance, in which the Soviet Union – or Russia, depending on which interest group was consulted – would exist as a democratic republic – or, as some suggested, a monarchy again – which would be a supportive military and trade ally of Germany.
Germany was seen as a nation with positive associations, because it was part of a European traditionally shared cultural community. It also had a certain effect that it was a practising Christian society, as opposed to the Soviet Union, in which the state had made a substantial and rather heavy-handed effort to eliminate religious practice.
The figurehead of the movement was Lieutenant General Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov, a decorated war hero, who had made his way up through the ranks of the Red Army, based on merit. In the autobiography of one of the leaders of the Southern Front, responsible for the defence of Kiev – and later General Secretary Nikika S. Khrushchev, Vlasov is mentioned as an able commander.
After the defeat of his 2nd Shock Army in the summer of 1942, Vlasov is captured by German forces. He offers to fight in an established Russian liberation army.
While working on this, he stresses some good things with the Soviet system as opposed to Imperial Russia, but he also stresses that which is unacceptable in the new system – that the system is not, what it is pretending to be. The German army responded positively to the idea, but postponed taking full advantage of it due to the scepticism of the political leadership, based on ideological issues. Vlasov was allowed to travel to POW camps and occupied areas, where he presented his cause – which was popular, and the soldiers already active in the Wehrmacht, albeit not as part of a common coordinated force, started wearing the ROA insignia, as they saw themselves as part of a shared cause – a liberation army.

The Soviet official position:
Critical angle

A minor group of Soviet citizens cooperated with the German occupation force. The collaborators were either former prisoners of war or soldiers and civilians, who changed sides during the war.
Having surrendered to the invaders, the prisoners of war were already counted as traitors by Soviet definition, as these were considered people, who were not willing to make an effort and sacrifice to defend their country – who had let themselves get surrounded on the battlefield and taken the easy way out by surrendering instead of fighting to the end. Volunteering for the liberation movement after capture demonstrates their weakness, either by making the choice based on threats of physical abuse, or allowing themselves to be bribed with pay, food and relative freedom.
The soldiers and civilians, who changed sides, were perceived as cowards and opportunists in the same fashion, as people willing to sacrifice the future of their homeland to be on the (apparently) winning side, where it was possible to gain something for oneself. It was seen as typical for the kind of people who are weak and deceitful by nature – or as a variation of this, people who had lost land, fortune and privileges with the people’s revolution, well-off families and large-scale farmers (kulaki), who had no interest in the preservation of the Soviet Union. Vlasov had allowed the defeat of the 2nd Shock Army and surrendered to the German army in order to live comfortably and benefit. He, too, was a chameleon, who made his alliances, where he found a winning side. Upon capture, he let the Wehrmacht use him as a propaganda marionet, partly to weaken the moral of the soldiers of the Red Army, partly to keep the prisoners of war passive and partly to recruit troops, that could be used for various purposes of use to the Wehrmacht. This treason was compounded by the establishment of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (KONR), where he not only let his German masters lead him, but actively took control in the campaign against his homeland.
The assumptions about Vlasov are confirmed by the circumstances around his capture by Soviet soldiers; he was captured on the way to the American sector, where he was found to be in possession of a large amount of money. This is interpreted as meaning that he had gained what he could and was searching for a new winning master – yet another capitalist state, which the USSR had allied with temporarily, but which should be treated with caution. During the final trial in 1946, he admitted to having lost heart, that he was offended by his country, and admitted to his treason. So, when he and his inner circle were hanged, they got the punishment which was to be expected and deserved for traitors of such a caliber.

References

There is a lot of material on the topic – as you may suspect from the view expressed above, it is a challenge to find balanced material on this.
I have found the following two to be the most comprehensive:

• Catherine Andreyev: Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement Soviet Reality and Emigré Theories. Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies, 1990. (Openlibrary entry)
• Joachim Hoffmann: Wlassow gegen Stalin. Die Tragödie der Russischen Befreiungsarmee 1944/45. Herbig, 2003. (OpenLibrary entry)

There are also interesting memoirs:

• Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt: Against Stalin and Hitler. Memoir of the Russian Liberation Movement 1941-5. Translation by David Footman. London: Macmillan, 1970. (OpenLibrary entry).
  Translated from: Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt: Gegen Stalin und Hitler. General Wlassow und die russische Freiheitsbewegung. 2. Aufl. 1970. (OpenLibrary entry)
  On Strik-Strikfeldt’s experiences as an interpreter for the German army, ending up as a contact officer between the German leadership and Vlasov and his group.
• Артемьев В.П.: Первая дивизия РОА. London: Издательство Союза Борьбы за Освобождение Народов России (СБОНР), 1974.
  About the activity of the 1st KONR division, which Artem’iev was in.
• Казанцев А. С.: Третья Сила. История одной попытки. Изд. Посев. Frankfurt-am-Main, 1974.
  Mr. Kazantsev was a journalist and writer who was with the press department of the Russian liberation movement.

Also, a couple of additional articles of interest:

• Катусев А. Ф., Оппоков В. Г.: Иуды (Власовцы на службе у фашизма). Военно-Исторический Журнал 6/1990, p. 68-81. Москва: Изд-во “Красная Звезда”, 1990.
  About the trial and motives of the KONR leadership.
• Кринько Е. Ф.: Коллаборационизм в СССР в годы Великой Отечественной Войны и его изучение в российской историографии. Вопросы Истории 11/2004, Moscow. P. 153-164

The thing about US society which stands out to a Danish person is the distance between the well-off and those less so. Denmark is a rather flat society in comparison – while there is wealth in Denmark, the poverty is not great; while the unemployed are by no means wealthy, they are also not left to fend for themselves and receive a substantial grant. Those who aren’t able to make ends meet are usually people with a substance abuse or mental issues.

But there is a back side to this. In my home country, the state subsidy system leads to a perception that things are taken care of – which makes people less inclined to support issues outside of their own narrow sphere. We are committed to a supporting system – we pay high taxes – and are concerned whether the taxes are spent well – but it is also a mechanism placing a comfortable bareer between a person and the unpleasant aspects of life and society. Here, everyone is quite aware of what it means to be in an unprotected situation. A job means security in the sense that you can pay your insurance, keep your children in school and so on – but inversely, if you lose your job, it is so much more of a challenge here, which also goes a long way in explaining the way people are heavily networking – job hunting is just that. The emphasis on abilities and merit shows everywhere, too – my son’s daycare is considerably more active with teaching him things than we were used to back home, and I can feel it stimulating him. This is also a way to channel the curiousity and creativity of children, and that is not a bad thing, but a constructive one. My mother was teaching me to read long before I started school, and because I learned out of interest, I was well-equipped from an early stage. When I started learning adding and subtracting, my father explained multiplication and division to me – I remember it well, we were walking in the Julby forest – and this was such an interesting expansion of the mindset that I picked it up and played around with it. That is how I learned, and that is why Matthias will learn to pick up ideas he is presented with. I have no doubt that this schooling will equip him better for that.

There is a balance to it. I know a lot of Danish people who have come to a successful position in their lives through having tried a lot of things. People are not afraid to take a break or change direction, because the often-mentioned safety net is there. Here, people will have to hang on to their jobs, but they will also shuffle, changing directions to choose a safer and more profitable course. In Denmark, people will take a new job which is more stimulating and offer better conditions, often people mention greater responsibility; but rarely have I heard people talk about doing it for money. The tax levels mean that you will need a significant raise to be able to feel it – and since people are generally getting by, there is not much of an encouragement to go for that. Interestingly, Danes will appreciate an improvement at a 100 DKr ($20) cost considerably more than a raise of ten times that, since it gives the impression that the company is looking out for the employees.

As I am preparing a move to the US, it seems reasonable to prepare a more international site than my Danish Syntaktisk.dk. And here you are – and so am I.