Prisons First!

I learnt yesterday from the regional TV news that the inmates in the Asturies regional prison were receiving the Covid19 vaccine, all of them, regardless of their age!!! Yes, I've said inmates, I mean, criminals (I say this in case you think I'm confusing prison workers with prison "inhabitants"). For normal people, the youngest group being vaccinated at this time in Asturies is the 50 to 59 years old group. So criminals are being favored over the rest of the population!!!

The explanation seems to be that due to the living conditions in prison, prisoners are more at risk to get the disease. OK, maybe it's true, but honestly, I don't give a shit. Justice system in Spain (as in all of Western Europe) is terribly soft with criminals, so in most occasions, when someone enters in prison it's because he has done something serious... OK, I admit that there are people in prison that just made a mistake for which they are paying too much (or directly, innocent people that have been wrongly sentenced)... but many of those in prison are real criminals: rapists, murderers, drug dealears, people involved in human trafficking... people that have destroyed other people's lives... and the government is giving precedence to those people over the normal population!

What disturbs me the most is that nobody seems to care. I have hardly seen any article revolting against this shameful situation... it's as if nobody gives a damn... Bearing in mind that in most cases rapists are getting their vaccine before the women that they raped, one could at least expect that the feminists would have something to say... but no, it seems as if the idea that "those in prison are victims of our evil society" has permeated everything.

Well, it could have been even worst. In France for example, where the far-left sickening hatred for our civilization has infected most of the so called "journalists" and 95% of judges... we can consider it as an achievement that nobody has proposed to vaccinate Muslims and Non-whites first, as a way to compensate for centuries of "European oppression, racism, slave trade and islamophobia...". Indeed, feminists could also have asked to vaccinate women first, again as a form of compensation. Yes, indeed, why should the white, heterosexual, European man, that evil creature that is responsible for all the injustices in the world, be vaccinated at all? Ah, yes, maybe because when the next pandemia arrives you'll need that white, heterosexual monster to help design the new vaccine...

Vive le Congo!

J'ai appris récemment que les attaques djihadistes en Afrique se sont répandues bien au-delà du Sahel, la Somalie et la Nigeria. Ça qui m'a profondément surpris c'est qu'ils ont touché des pays que je n'associais pas avec l'Islam: Mozambique, RDC. Ces pays sont majoritairement cristians, mais malheurosament il y a une présence musulmane importante aussi (entre 2% et 10% en RDC, mais 18% en Mozambique... puff, ça fait peur...).. Même qu'a République Centro-africaine ou le Cameroun, l'Islam est concentré dans certaines areas du pays, mais il est aussi bien présent dans toutes les grandes villes.

Cette semaine une bagarre a éclaté entre 2 groupes musulmans rivaux pendant la cérémonie de clôture du ramadan à Kinshasa, RDC. La police a dû intervenir et un policier a été tu (et autres très gravement blesses)... Après ces faits déplorables, la justice est rapidement intervenue, et contrairement à ce qui se passe en Europa, la justice a fait JUSTICE, et 30 malfaiteurs ont été condamnes à mort! Bravo!

On peut rêver de voir la même JUSTICE appli en France. Voir la racaille qui attaque gratuitement, tue et viol a les "blancs", a les Asiatiques, aux Juifs (bref, aux non musulmans), être guillotiné en la Place de la République, la Place Bellecour, la Place du Capitole, la Place de la Bourse... Mais non, ici c'est le royaume des "droits de l'Homme"... C'est bien ça, le problème c'est quand on donne ces droits à des sous-hommes... Mais bon, on sait bien que dans le monde d'aujourd'hui, souhaiter justice est une aspiration de "facho".

Playing with ixjs AsyncIterable

Some days ago I came across this beautiful library that by means of an ix.Iterable and ix.AsyncIterable classes sort of brings the functionality available for push streams in rxjs to pull streams (both synchronous and asynchronous iterables and generators). They talk about the "arrays extras" methods, but there are more. It's related to what I prototyped time ago here and here.

The usage pattern is based on rxjs, so once you have created an (ix)Iterable/AsyncIterable object from a generator/iterable, you use the pipe function to chain functions. This ends up creating a chain of objects (FiterIterable, MapIterable...) working in a lazy way. Once you've created the chain, nothing will happen until you start to iterate the resulting Iterable, and the functions in the chain are not executed for all the items at the same time when the iteration starts, but just one by one the moment you are retriving that specific element. Well, this should sound very familiar if you're used to working with Linq in the .Net world.

The samples in their web give you a basic introduction. For AsyncIterables, one of the most useful use case is related to what they explain in the Converting from Iterable to AsyncIterable section, but the sample there is too trivial to get the full idea I think. Imagine we have an array and we want to apply some mapping and filtering, but some of the iteratee functions (lodash/fp parlor, the function that we pass to map-filter) are asynchronous and others synchrous. For that you'll need the methods in the ix.AsyncIterable, that work both with async and sync functions. Let's see an example (given an array of cities, call and async api to get its countries, filter the non null results, and then convert to upper case)

import { from as asyncIterableFrom } from 'ix/asynciterable/index.js';
import { filter as asyncFilter, map as asyncMap } from 'ix/asynciterable/operators/index.js';

function asyncSleep(interval){
    return new Promise(resolveFn => setTimeout(resolveFn, interval));
}

async function findCountryForCityAsync(city){
    let countries = [
        {
            name: "France",
            mainCities: ["Toulouse", "Paris", "Lyon", "Marseille", "Bordeaux"]
        },
        {
            name: "Belgium",
            mainCities: ["Bruxelles", "Antwerp", "Liege"]
        }
    ];
    console.log("finding country for " + city);
    await asyncSleep(2000);
    let country = countries.find(country => country.mainCities.findIndex(_city => _city == city) > -1);
    return country ? country.name : null;
}

let cities = ["Toulouse", "Paris", "Ghent", "Bruxelles"];

let transformedCitiesIterable = asyncIterableFrom(cities).pipe(
    asyncMap(findCountryForCityAsync),
    asyncFilter(city => city !== null),
    asyncMap(x => x.toLocaleUpperCase())
);
console.log("transformedCitiesIterable type: " + transformedCitiesIterable.constructor.name);
//we have an objects chain like this:
// MapAsyncIterable -> FilterAsyncIterable -> MapAsyncIterable -> FromAsyncIterable

//async main
(async () => {
    console.log("starting asyncIterableTest");
    for await (let city of transformedCitiesIterable){
        console.log(city);
    }
    console.log("ending asyncIterableTest");
})();

I've uploaded it to a gist. The documentation for this nice library is mainly missing, but someone generated docs for it here

The .Net equivalent (more or less) to this library is System.Linq.Async, and you can find a good sample here.

The German Doctor

I've recently watched a rather interesting Argentinian film, The German Doctor. It's a fictional story inspired by partially known real events, the months of exile spent in Bariloche, Argentina, by Nazi Doctor/Researcher/Psychopath, Josef Menguele

It's known that many Nazis found refuge in South America after WWII. One of the main routes to get there went through Spain (that in some cases was not just a stopover, but the final destination), which is not strange as Spain was under the dictatorship of Franco, that during the war had sympathised with Hitler (whatever hatred I feel for Franco and regardless of all the support he received from Germany and Italy during the Spanish Civil War, I have to admit that I don't think he was completely in line with Nazi ideology, though and important part of "his guys", the Falange scum mainly, were real Nazi admirers). What I was not so aware of is that the Argentinian president, Peron, was a nazi sympathizer, so while the large German community established in Argentine well before the War firmly helped the nazis to accomodate in the country, it was the Argentinian government itself who played the major role.

The film tells the story of how Mengele established for some months in Bariloche, helped by the local, pro-nazi, German community (and some "invisible hand" that seemed to fund him). There he continued his genetic "research", focused on a local family where the mother is pregnant with twins and the daugher is a teenager with serious growth problems. This family is fictional, and the stay of Menguele in Bariloche is not proved, but the shocking setting of the large pro-Nazi community with their German, "Nazi youth like" school, is quite realistic. By the way, it's amazing how Bariloche looked like and Alpine ville.

One can find a bit disturbing that for the most part Mengele is depicted as a rather kind, even charming, person, that at first seems pretty involved helping this family, even helping the father, that does not get on well with him since the beginning (indeed, this animosity makes the husband look like unfair). Well, from what I've watched in an old documentary, it's likely that Menguele was a bit like that. You can be a beast with those that you consider inferior, and a correct, kind person with the rest. The fact that Hitler loved his dogs is commonly used as an example.

There's a short but good interview with the writer-director, Lucía Puezo, here. She makes a smart reflection on how paradoxical it is that Nazis ended up finding refuge in such a Mestizo place as South America.

But I was especially interested in their obsession with genetics, with making the perfect race. It is almost a paradox that Mengele, so obsessed with racial purity, should end up in a continent (not only in Argentina – he spent a year in Paraguay and Brazil), where we all have mixed blood.