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!

Ownership

Someone once said The things you own will end up owning you. I seem to have heard it in connection with Buddhism and Fight Club. The thing is that it is utterly true.
I don't claim to have that much stuff. I'm not a particularly rich person, and I live in a tiny hole-in-the-wall. What I do have, however, seems to be all over the place, even when I put my things where they belong. I have so many thing that I keep for the sole reason of "ohh, I'm sure I'll use this again some day". For some things it is good, like bank papers and receipts and stuff of that nature. For other things like clothes or electronics, it is quite the opposite. I, for instance, have a sandwich maker in a bag that I haven't used for years, but I can't bring myself to throw it away, because it's a 50 euro sandwich maker, and I'm a poor student.

I would absolutely love to be able to live out of a bag, with just my computer, my music, some clothes and some other knickknacks, but it seems to be impossible. If nothing else, all the books I amass take up a shitload of space, and that's not counting the 3 boxes of books I have stashed in my dad's garage. All in all, I have too much shit. I've gotten it down to as small a core as I can, and I still have too much stuff that never sees the light of day. No matter how hard I try, I can't get rid of it. The fact that I have no storage room to put it in, and that I have to have it in boxes and bags on my floor further exacerbates the problem.

The things I own have truly ended up owning me. What I need is a proper fire to forcibly make me part with all my shit (and give me some insurance money to buy half of it back with).

On Social Networking

I was looking at my brother's Facebook profile, and I was overwhelmed at how filled-in it was.
He had a vast network of friends who were all on Facebook, he had some "apps" running, and a tonne of pictures.
Now, I could very well hook in to that, since about half of his friends are my friends as well, but I don't know if I have the energy to fully invest myself in yet another social networking site.
Granted, I don't hang out on many, and I'm still not sure that social networking isn't anything more than a time sink, but it's not like I (currently) have very much else to do.
The problem, of course, is that the amount of other stuff I have to do varies, while the need to keep your social networking profile going stays the same. There are various solutions to this, but regardless of which one you pick, something has to get put on the back burner. Either the social networking site(s), or something else in your life.

Yet another problem is that if I decide complete my profile, and spend hours and hours on Facebook, feeling important, what happens if Facebook either calls it quits, or something else pops up that is "all the rage", and people just migrate? I know that competition is healthy in a marketplace, and in most cases the consumers benefit from it.
Here, on the other hand, competition kills the user. Since no one is paying for any of these services, the biggest advantage of competition is lost, namely that prices go down if multiple vendors offer the same merchandise. Also, since all the data is proprietary, moving from one social networking site to another requires the user to put in all the time again to fill the profile of the new service, and keep it plied with photos and witty remarks.

Even though it is not in the best interest of the social networking sites, in fact it could quite possibly be devastating to some, it would be nice if they offered all your information in some portable format. That way, when something new comes along, you can just export your profile from one service, and import it to another. The advantages here for the users should be apparent:

• The users only need to enter their data once.
• The users get the best from the developers of the social networking site, since they know that proprietary data tie-in is no longer a possibility, they must fight for the users, constantly adding new features and besting their rivals.

Another nice though would be interoperability between social networking sites, but that's as likely to happen as hell dropping below zero.

If we look at this from a slightly different perspective, we can throw most of what I just said out of the window. The thing with these social networking sites is that, while they enable people to connect in ways never though possible, they provide the user with something to do.
Much like TV, keeping an active profile on a social networking site is an opium for the masses. If it was easy and required no time, people wouldn't do it. At least not more than once.

It's basically all about group mentality. Someone does something that is perceived as cool, and everybody else wants to jump on the bandwagon. Nowadays, if your profile isn't as filled as the profiles of the people around you, you are considered to be less of a person, because you obviously have fewer friends.

Social networking sites can be fun, and they are surely a time sink. If they are good or bad or just plain frivolous remains to be seen. I think that the more time you put in to them, the more you are likely to get out of them (as with most things in life), but I also think that there is a threshold you mustn't cross, when the time spent updating your profile takes over more important tasks like getting work done. (To the adults in the audience who expected "more important tasks like spending time with your friends", I say this: you are living in an outdated society. This is spending time with your friends, and the sooner adults and parents see that, the sooner kids all around the world will be better off. I have met some of my best friends via various Internet communication services.)

I wanted to close with something about using social networking services with moderation, but then the words of Hunter S. Thompson struck me, "Anything worth doing, is worth doing right".

I guess you have to ask yourself, are social networking sites worth doing?

I really should re-read these things and pick out the core theme and write a proper article, like a real writer, but right now I can't be bothered.

On A Roll

I've been feeling a bit under the weather this last week. The phrase "my old bones ache" (from Warcraft III, actually. Spoken by Cairn Bloodhoof) really fit me yesterday and the day before. Today the aching is gone, but now my throat hurts instead.
My roommate gave me throat pills with Lidocain in them, which do a pretty good job of easing the pain. I'm going to the store for some more of the same in the morning. Might be good to have. They contained a shitload of Lidocain too, I can barely feel my tongue, hehe.

Anyway, what I was getting at was the fact that I haven't had the energy to blog properly this week, and I first thought that I'd submit a series of small blog posts, but then I thought what the hell, and put them all in one big one. Thus:

This week was spent in London, as some of you might know. Not actually IN London I guess, but more just west of London in a little shit hole called Reading. (All British towns are shit holes, no offense.) I went to visit a dear old friend of mine. We partied hard, like we always do, and I had a blast! I guess I did come home with some sort of fever, but I suppose that's the price you pay for going all out. I met a lot of cool new people there. Some of which were from South Africa, which is pretty neat. What they were doing in the UK though, I will never know.
I also met this really cute girl. At first I thought "But, she's cute... There are no cute girls in England.", but then my friend explained that she wasn't from England, and that's when all the pieces fell in to place. It's too bad that we live in different parts of the world though. Travel is fairly cheap I guess, but not that cheap. It's not like jumping on your bike and riding for 10 minutes.

Speaking of travel, my friend told me that I might have to watch what I bring with me on the plane, what with the recent ban of liquids on board and all that nonsense. They actually did force us to put stuff in transparent bags at Schipol, to carry through the security check, but at least we were allowed to put those things back in our bags after security.
I wonder what the point of that exercise is. Do they think that the security people could have spotted "dangerous" liquids just by looking at them? I'll bet you a small country to a bent hair pin that no one that works security at an airport can tell if one water like substance or another can be used to make explosives. "But they put it through machines" you say, "maybe the machines know?". Well, if the machines know, then why can't we just keep the containers loose in our bags? Why do they need to be packed in sealed transparent bags?
A false sense of security, and a shitload of inconvenience is all it is. I don't even feel safer, not one bit.
Ohh, and when I'm going through security in Gatwick, I start noticing that our queue is much slower than the others. I look ahead, and find that we have to take out fucking shoes off and put them through the x-ray machine too!
Can you believe this bullshit? What's next? walking naked through the metal detector? Putting humans through the x-ray? When does it stop? When will the people of the world rise up as one and say "No more of this bullshit!"?
Don't you see that the terrorists have already won? Being a terrorist, by definition, means that you are someone bent on creating terror. Creating terror doesn't necessarily mean crashing airplanes into skyscrapers. Creating terror means to instill a feeling of terror in other people (or animals, for that matter). To make others afraid.
I think they've done a pretty good job at it so far. We're so scared that we'll allow virtually any freedom reducing "security" measure to feel a little bit safer, yet we're not safer off now than we were before 9/11!
All these so called security measures didn't stop people from bringing liquid explosives on airplanes, and it's sure as hell not going to stop nefarious people doing whatever their doing next, because they know our every move! They know our full strategy! They have our game plan laid out for them to poke holes in!
As you might have gathered from this (and previous posts), I'm a privacy/freedom nut. I also happen to be a security nut, but one thing I'm not is a sheep. They are slowly but surely eroding our freedoms until there is nothing left.
I guess we're lucky that they still let people ride the subway, after what happened in London.
Nuts I tell you, NUTS!

I could rave about this all day, but I'm getting hungry. Time for some microwavable food, because I've spent all my energy writing this piece here, plus I'm sick, so I've earned an easy street dinner.

Watch this space!