Fun at work

It's summer, and it's time for fun at work. Sounds exciting, doesn't it? Sure, it is. It's not about sex or anything like that, unfortunately. All the girls are gone on vacation, and all the bosses too. No meetings, no phone calls, no mails to reply to.

July is the best time to work. Hours and days undisturbed. Time to do some real science. Just doing the mathematical analysis, with a pencil and a notebook. Great! And in the end, new ideas often end up in the official research activities of the company.

July this year was as usual, at least for the first 3 weeks. Then they called from the Moscow office.

My one-year multi-visa to Russia expires on the 24. August. It's good for another trip to Moscow in mid August. Now I'm preparing for meetings. Bye bye physics, bye bye math. Back to Powerpoint.

Whatever, I won't complain. This what they pay me to do, and the weather is warm and the sky is blue. I plan to take some vacation the next couple of weeks.

Then I'm ready for Moscow. It's a very fascinating city, and always a pleasure to visit.

Maybe I will meet Snowden at Sheremetyevo, if he's still there, in the transit area. I read in the papers that he might get permission to leave the airport. I hope it's true. There are better places to spend the time in Moscow.

(I usually scan my notes and trash the paper original. It's a convenient way to keep track of things, just a file on the computer.)

Spies and heroes

When I was a kid during the Cold War, I read a lot of spy-thrillers; Our Man in Havana (Graeme Greene), From Russia with Love (Ian Flemming), The Fourth Protocol (Frederick Forsyth ), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (John LeCarre), and many more. In the Cold-War thrillers, the Russians were the bad guys and the Americans (and Brits) were the heroes.

Now everything seems to be turned upside down. What I have in mind is the Snowden case.

To me Snodwen is a hero. He is a whistleblower who stands up against powerful organizations violating American and international law. He told the world that NSA violates rights of privacy, monitoring millions of accounts on Google and Facebook.

Whistleblowers never win. They’re always shot down, unless they stay undercover, like Deep Throat. But, history often gives them the credit they deserve.

The NSA claims they have prevented several terror attacks. That’s great. We can probably accept surveillance of selected groups and individuals to prevent terror.

But why does the NSA spy on European embassies and government offices? We don’t like that. I’ve always been a fan of Obama, but in this case he has disappointed me, if he knew what was going on.

I hope the NSA has noticed that Napoleon is no longer Emperor of France, and Hitler is not Chancellor of Germany. 

Today most EU countries are social democracies. Is this the motivation for the surveillance?

In America the only word that appears more scaring than terrorism is socialism. It means collective farms and gulags, Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot.

Social democracy is not the same as communism.

In practice, a social democracy is a capitalist system with a socialist touch. The social democracy has invented horrifying things like free health care and free education. Except from that, there’s not much to fear.

We’re friends of America and will always be. Part of a friendship is to tell your friend when he has done something unacceptable. 

(The cartoon was borrowed from joyreactor.com)