raving lunatics

It's been a few days since the last post. I could mention, by way of excuse, that I've been working a lot. Taken four proteins from cloning to crystallization in ten mad days. Those in the know might argues that that's next to impossible. The sequencing alone takes two days, after all. I might retort, in the hope that not everyone reads this line, that I've just applied for another batch of jobs and exaggerate my workload in the lab ever so slightly to impress the HR departments that spent half of their time on the internet these days, trying to dig up dirt, incrimination and scandal on social networking and photo sharing sites. As my face is notably absent from those ventures, I must get exposure otherwise. Where was I?

Right, it's been a few days, and not just any few days. It's been a few days of extraordinary madness, a week for the history books, and if not that, then at least a ball for the disgruntled and grumpy, whose ranks I join tonight, for no other reason that to add a post to this languishing collection.

Last weekend, a devil worshiper with a confused mind of epic proportions ripped a hole into the streets of Oslo and then slaughtered five dozen kids on a heretofore peaceful island. As the police force's helicopter pilots were on vacation, no one got to the massacre until the devil worshiper had run out of bullets. The Norwegian prime minister, an unemotional character by all accounts, admonishes his shocked compatriots to keep their spirit of tolerance.

Who's more dangerous, I wonder, I gasp, I gape? I'm speechless at such delusion and even the mocking written word fails me temporarily. A week later, words have come back to me, but I'm still stupefied. How can one advocate tolerance, unquestioning accepting in other words, of a mass murderer, of his actions and beliefs? Tolerance is always the easy escape for the weak. Tolerance never solves conflicts and only delays escalations. If you need a catchword for community cohesion and an inclusive society, try respect. Argue all you feel necessary with those you don't agree with, never tolerate opinions you find intolerable, but always do it with respect. If someone had engaged with the devil worshiper instead of tolerating his ranting and muttering, he might have blown up earlier and in a much less destructive way.

It is a deplorable sign of the times that Norwegian politicians aren't the only ones who've been abandoned by their senses. The UK Foreign Secretary, for example, has swapped the inhabitants of the Libyan embassy in London as if they were on an assured shorthold tenancy lease that had run out. Everyone agrees that Gaddafi is an asshole, a tyrant, a criminal and a menace, but that's not a recent development. He took control of Libya when the Foreign Secretary was in primary school.

In recent months, when new-found courage and the desire for freedom burned hot in North Africa, the opposition in Libya, whose sheer existence came as a surprise to most, became emboldened and took up arms. Now, in the middle of a civil war, where enough loyalists support the old dictator to prevent him from toppling like Mubarak or Ben Ali, the UK delegitimizes a regime that has been illegitimate for too long – only to replace it with another that has never been democratically legitimized. The people's will (as in the people of Libya) has never been expressed. Yet the UK and the rest of the EU scheme much like the US has done in Afghanistan. As painfully as it was acquired, the knowledge that one ragtag group of militants is just as bad as the next seems to have been forgotten already, or at least ignored for the moment.

Talking about ragtag militants and raving lunatics, what is going on in Somalia? I see pictures of children will bellies bloated to bursting from starvation (kwashiorkor, did you know?), I see dusty plains devoid of vegetation, I see desperate families fleeing a hostile land on their bare teeth. Aid organizations exhort us to give: These people need food. That goes without saying, but they've been needing food for decades because they have never had what they need most, a competent government that can organize life and build a functioning society. A government that builds infrastructure, educates its citizens and brings the modern agriculture to those who farm the land.

Instead, what Somalis have is tribal warfare and al-Shabab bandits, marauding insurgents on horseback, their piously betoweled heads belying their barbaric actions (devil worshipers, again). When concerted international aid efforts got underway to parachute tons of food onto the parched plains, the shababs flatly denied the need, professing to see a mild drought where everyone else has a hard time comprehending the extent of the famine. Were Somalia not a worthless bit of geography in the poker of international politics and weren't the US and Europe already overstretched to breaking, another regime change-inducing aerial campaign wouldn't be far off, but it's hard to see how the people could benefit.

Tonight's mad dash around the globe is almost over. Only one stop remains. I wouldn't go so far as to call it the maddest of all (though history might prove me wrong – knock on wood it doesn't), but it's certainly up there. In the US Congress, stubborn and inflexible parties of various affiliations continue to argue – eminently reasonably in their own eyes – about how to spend a certain amount of money (aka the budget) while only spending a smaller amount of money (aka the debt ceiling). If that were possible, I would live in a grandiose loft in Kensington and have dinner at Joël Robuchon's every night.

There's much whining, especially in high finance, about the end of the world in four days' time. I don't believe that the world cares much if the US doesn't pay interest on its debts for a month, but you never know. Financial markets have been spooked by lesser things (for example the possible default of a southern European country that's as insignificant as its history is glorious), and acted irrationally more often than not. So if the world really ends, remember that there's a summer weekend before that. Go out and enjoy!