On the state of national and international security

Look, I'm tired. I really am. Whenever I turn on the news (read check twitter), I'm bombarded with news stories about some treaty or other that will fuck with the civil liberties in the world, or some warrantless tapping scandal, or some gitmo abuse, or waterboarding, or any other redneck republican shit that we're forced to endure on a daily basis. I'm tired of hearing it, and I want it to stop. I want to read happy news about cars and photography and computer science and puppies and unicorns and all the other fluffy stuff I'm actually interested in.

While I could simply stop listening to the people that bring me this sad news, I don't want to. In fact, I want these people to go on doing what they are doing, and reporting the atrocities they find. I simply want them to have less to report about. I want there to be fewer atrocities committed by governments all over the globe. I want the governments of the world to simply stop what they are doing in the name of security and protecting the children and whatnot, and get back to maintaining roads, running hospitals, and giving us clean water to drink. I want the good news to drown out the bad news. I want to hear less bad news, while listening for more bad news.

tl;dr: Governments, stop fucking over your citizens!

"With all due respect, ma'am, you can go jump off a bridge,"

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/11/16/pledge_of_allegiance/index.html?source=rss&aim=/opinion/feature

I used to live in the US once. More than 10 years ago now. I was, in essence, also sent to the principal's office when I both refused to recite the oath, and when I didn't want to stand. I got out of reciting the oath, what with me not being a citizen and all, but I had to stand, because the other students were jealous of me sitting down when they were all forced to stand.

Bullshit Technicalities

As some of you know, my girlfriend is currently doing an internship for the European Commission in Brussels. As a result, I travel down there about every other weekend, and she travels back the remaining weekends. This seemed like a good deal, because the EC had promised to pay for our trips, since I'm her "significant other", and she was actually leaving "home" to do this internship.

It now turns out, however, that definitions matter a great deal to the EC. Because we were not officially living together, and that she didn't return to her registered address (that she moved out of when she left for Brussels) when the came back here (but rather to me), it doesn't count, so we don't get out money back. None of it, not a cent.

Not that I hadn't gone down to see her as often as I could even if they hadn't promised to pay, but you just feel fucked over by the government, once again, when this kind of stuff happens. When we were first told about the reimbursements, I thought to myself "hey, maybe there is at least some good in government circles", but I was wrong. The government keeps screwing you over at every chance they get. They get by on doing the bare minimum required, and often not even that. In the immortal words of Leo Getz, "They fuck you at the drive-thru!"

I feel properly and fully rogered. Thanks EU, this is just what I needed. A good ass-fucking to show me who's boss!

One Hundred Million!

Imagine that I found 100 million euro somewhere. In cash.
I found them, no one else is going to claim them, they are mine.

How would I go about inserting that money into the economy of the world?
How do I get them from their fairly unwieldy current form into something more usable, say, a bank account? I can't very well run around and use cash all the time. The economy just doesn't work that way. Besides, what if I get robbed?

How would I go about it? How would you go about it?
What are the advantages of the various ways? How do you do this without having to either pay undue fees, or get the government breathing down your neck about the whole thing (the suspicious, tax collecting lot that they are)? Would I have to launder it, even though it is mine?

Please provide your answers below.

For that matter, if you know, what is the physical size of 100 million euro. A wad? An attaché case? A crate? A truck?

Waterboarding IS Torture

I was reading today about waterboarding. I don't know what triggered it, but an hour of fascinated wikipedia clicking later, and I knew enough to categorically declare waterboarding torture.
I also read that there are some reported and admitted cases of the US using waterboarding to interrogate prisoners in morden times (the last 5-10 years). I'm sure there are also a bunch of false reports, but the fact that there is even one substantiated and confirmed report makes me sick to my stomach.
While the concept of torture is an interesting one, from a scientific point of view, subjecting humans to anythin remotely close to what I have read about today is nothing short insane.
Victims will say anything to escape the torture. Sometimes interrogators are lucky and they go after someone who actually has something of value to disclose, but if it was me on that board, I'd admit to the whole holocaust if it meant that I didn't have to be tortured.
Some might call me wek minded, but torture is an attrocity, and anyone performing it should receive the harshest possibly punishment.
Totrure shoudl not be performed. In any way shape or form. There can be no exception here whatsoever. Even the Geneva Convention backs me up on this one.

The worst part is that there is no oversight. There is noone to monitor the monitors. Supposedly the police are to be the monitors. If you do anything wrong, they punish you. (police / legal system). This isn't the case though, because the military can do things the police can't, and they don't have to tell you about it. What's worse is that the intelligence agencies do even worse things, and it's not that they don't have to tell you about it, but peopel never find out.
Even if countries have strong willed leaders who are against these sort of things, intelligence organizations, such as the CIA for instance, do whatever they damn well please, and noone is the wiser.

The torture has to stop. Humans need to be treated like humans. Not even when they are proven guilty should human treatment be abandoned. There is never a reason for torture.
And even if there was, what if you've got the wrong guy? What if your assumptions are wrong? What if he doesn't know anything? There are so many "what if"s that any argument for torture can be swiftly dealt with by the massive amount of uncertainty surrounding the authorization of torture.

Governments publicly declare that they are against torture (most of them anyway), but when pressed on specific issues (like waterboarding), they squirm and shed responsibility by claiming that a specific interrogation technique isn't classified as torture.
Anything that more than basically a heated conversation with possibly some screaming should be considered torture. Inflicting pain or the threat of pain, both mental or physical, is torture. There are no two ways about it.

Some of you, undoubtably, would say that there are exceptions. Much like how banning certain forms of expression and thought might seem convenient, who determines where to draw the line?
A lot of people would love to ban nazi symbols and racist speech. Make it a punishable offense. This might seem, by most, as an aceptable thing to do, but who's to say that the next "bad" thing isn't being republican. Or muslim.
If we let governments get away with this sort of thing there is no going back. There is no revoking the privilege. History shows that privileges given to governments are never given back.

The problem, as with most things human, is that there is no easy solution to the problem of government. Humans are inherently power-hungry, and they will do all they can in a position of power to make it last longer, or get elevated into a position of more power. One could argue for direct democracy, that everyone votes on all the issues, but that's not feasible. Besides, most people don't care about most decisions anyway, nor are they informed enough to make a proper decision.

I realize that we are moving away from the central issue here, which is that torture is bad, but this issue arises due to the fact that there is very little the population can do about the behavior of the government. Fear is an excellent way of controlling a population, and most governments have mastered it and made it an art.

Don't believe everything you hear. Question everything. Make sure that you know the facts.
You should even question what I wrote here. Don't take my word for it, investigate!