Canada: It's Your Patriotic Duty to be an Asshole

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So, why the title, you might ask.

Well. The Harper government believes that we should be more friendly with the US and establish greater relations with them. In fact, integrate further with them and help the two nations become closer, through economic, foreign and domestic policy, all which seek to erode our basic right to national sovereignty, free of American influence. Our policies ought to be set for what Canadians want; not what a bunch of brainless hicks from the White House.

So, why be an asshole you ask.

Well, by being an asshole, you're being a true Canadian patriot. It is your duty to oppose any move to integrate the two economies, if not three, if you also taken into consideration the Mexicans to the south.

You can be an asshole by not wanting to join in such charades and speaking out against the government, which would love to engage in fearmongering tactics in order to fulfill its neo-conservative agenda, hellbent on dismantling the Canada we know and love, even if that relationship in recent years has been a little rocky.

Being a Canadian patriot means realising that NAFTA is a load of horse shit designs to screw over the average Canuck. Chapter 11 of NAFTA does just that!

NAFTA - Chapter 11 Part 1

And you know who greatly opposes NAFTA and increasingly this particular section? A sitting member of the Canadian House of Commons, Jack Layton, author of Speaking Out: Ideas That Work For Canadians. His books outlines his policies which are pure Canadian; ideas and theories that are thought of by a Canadian with Canadians in mind. And yet, his party doesn't get more support because we're led to believe that the NDP don't know what Canadians want, when in fact, they are the only ones who inceasingly seem to.

Being a Canadian patriot means being a complete tool when it comes to your census.

Yes, the due date past, but, if you're like me, you probably did something stupid on your census, like NOT fill it out online but stuck with the old pen and paper method, filling in the form creatively, while making it harder for the machine (provided by US arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin).

The Great Wall of Israeli Ignorance

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Court upholds Israeli spouse ban

You're Israeli; so, according to Israeli law, you're permitted to be the world's biggest racist asshole and no one can stop you because you're a Jew and your family was supposedly part of the Holocaust and you're now being threatened by those big scary raghead camel jockeys across over in Saudi Arabia.

While you're at it, forget about fostering tolerance; we can't have Arabs with the same rights because then we can't lock them away in West Bank, garnish their salaries and refuse to give them back their money that was taken under the guise of "taxation".

You cannot live in Israel because we all know that all Arabs are terrorists by birth.

The government says the law, passed at a time of rising violence in 2002, is based on security concerns.

Ok, so, if someone marries an Israeli, despite that they are showing that they don't care about the religious and ethnic differences, they cannot move into Israel because they are a "security" risk simply because of their ethnicity?

Or...

But the Israeli state says the recent election victory of the militant group Hamas strengthened its case that Palestinians were a security risk and should not be allowed into the country.

State-sanctioned discrimination at its finest.

So, just because the majority of the asshole in your country decides that they want to vote in some terrorist, it by presumed association makes everyone a terrorist, even that little zygote who was recently conceived; we can't take chances here.

So, because a segment the Palestinian population democratically elected Hamas, it must mean that they are all terrorists, just as all Americans are ignorant Bible-thumping rednecks who drive pickup trucks, pride themselves on being morbidly obese and answer to the name of either Bubba or Mary-Sue because 51% of the approximately 55% (122,293,720) voters who turned out voted to keep the Republicans in office. Despite this, there are 174,800,000 registered voters and 221,256,931 who are eligible.

Sure, voter turn out in Palestine was much higher; 74.6%-76.0% in the Gaza Strip and 73.1% in the West Bank, but, that doesn't mean anything, or does it? It could very well mean that the Palestinians are embracing democracy in a new form.


[Source: Wiki: Palestinian legislative election, 2006]

So, only ~44% (440,600) of the Palestinians, who are of voting age, actually voted for Hamas, versus the ~40% (410, 550) who voted for Fatah, and as a result, the population as a whole is viewed as a threat?

No wonder Israel and America get along so well...

Big Brother is Listening...

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'Big Brother' is a concept that was introduced in George Orwell's novel, 1984, that embodied the concept of a police state, in which no activity would go unnoticed because the state, or, big brother was always watching.

The concept has been applied recently to a number of activities that have been conducted by the current American Administration, under the watch of President Bush, who has admitted to "wiretapping", essentially violating the inalienable privacy rights of all American citizens.

Under the guise of protecting America in the post-9/11 era, in which the norm is to instil a culture of paranoia through the careful release of bin Laden tapes, and terror level warnings, with the liberal assistance of the misnamed and controversial 'Patriot Act', the administration has come to embrace the role of 'big brother'.

Many previously cherished rights have been eroded, or modified to suit the needs of an anti-libertarian administration that feels no moral remorse for its un-American-like actions.

Want to borrow a book from the local library? You can bet on the FBI or CIA knowing about it, since they could find out about this under the Patriot Act.

Want to get married? Better ensure that you conform to the level of impeccable moral standards of the religious right and ensure that your sexuality is nothing but pure and reflective of the Bible. If you're homosexual, you have no right to get married because in the eyes of God, you're a bloody sinner and there is only one place for you; a seat reserved for you and your fuck buddy in Cocytus, the ninth level of hell.

Believe in progressive environmental alternatives? Forget it, it's un-American and by not driving an SUV, you're supporting the terrorists. Buy homemade, not foreign! (well, this wasn't a right; just a bit of an attitude issue)...

It's not ok to insult Mr President, unless you're a Republican and now it's trendy because the newest election term is upcoming and the president's approval ratings are lower than Paris Hilton's neckline...

Oh, phooey, it seems we've gone off on a tangent, when we've been meaning to write about the latest trend of spying on Americans by listening to their phone conversations.

Yes, indeed Big Brother is listening. You may better know him as the CIA.

US spy agency 'monitoring calls'

The country's three biggest phone companies have been handing over call records to the National Security Agency (NSA) since 2001, [USA Today] says.

And these companies would be: AT&T, Verizon and Bell South.

And like pious corporations, they've vehemently declared that they've never engaged in such controversial activities.

Right. Whatever. You. Say.

"Our intelligence activities strictly target al-Qaeda and their known affiliates," [President Bush] said in a brief White House statement after the newspaper report appeared.

"The privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected," he said, adding: "We are not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans."

Have we so quickly forgotten about the American Taliban? The all-American white boy, who converted to Islam and had joined up with the renegade rank and file of the al-Qaeda network. Obviously... after all, anyone can be a terrorist and you don't have to be Middle Eastern or Arab. The only prerequisite: being a lunatic.

Further, if they were so concerned, they'd be more privacy orientated, and the Patriot Act wouldn't exist, not even in a mild form.

US senators reacted quickly to the allegation, saying they would order the phone companies to testify about it.

Senator Patrick Leahy, the senior Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee, reacted with anger to the report, brandishing the newspaper in committee meeting.

"We need to know what our government is doing to spy upon Americans," he said.

But Republican senators suggested Mr Leahy was over-reacting.

They pointed out that the story did not allege wiretapping, only the creation of a database in order to analyse calling patterns.
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The communications act of 1934 bars companies from releasing information about callers...

Here we go again; déja vu all over.

Democrats jump onto the bandwagon and say one thing, while the Republicans sink themselves on a ship to nowhere.

And are you honestly going to trust a government that has previously admitted to such endeavours?

The patriotic thing to do is to be sceptical and question the government. The government is there to serve the people and to help establish social order in order to create and maintain a republic wherein the people have the greatest voice, and not a obstreperous minority that seeks to override the rights of many simply because they are in contradiction with the minority's moral values.

An interesting comment from a previous blog entry seems to have some relevance to this enty. It seems that he wrote this without realising what today's rant was on...

"When the government and military can be thwarted by a single man - A HOBBYIST - on the other side of the planet, how can they fool anyone into thinking that their fascist republic keeps them safe with wiretaps and spies? The people really do have the power." ~ Brian Damage, Demodulated

Curiosity Indicted the Hacker

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We've all heard the proverb "curiosity killed the cat", well, this could be applied to any situation in which one's curiosity not only gets the best of them, but inevitably results in irreversible consequences.

Such as in the case of UK citizen Gary McKinnon, who is being indicted by the US military for causing damage to their equipment when he hacked into their network, which wasn't password protected, a tragic, fallible error on the part of the military.

They shouldn't be attempting to indict Mr McKinnon. They should be thanking him. What's worse? Getting hacked by a hacker who merely wants to satisfy his insatiable curiosity, or by a terrorist who could capitalise on that knowledge?

If you visit the third link, which is an interview between Mr McKinnon and Spencer Kelly from the BBC, you'll see he describes his program as:

Unlike the press would have you believe, it wasn't very clever. I searched for blank passwords, I wrote a tiny Perl script that tied together other people's programs that search for blank passwords, so you could scan 65,000 machines in just over eight minutes.

I bolded the blank password part. It's curious that he says he was using a program that seeks out blank passwords and not pre-existing ones. If he got in, it would then mean that the military's network security isn't totally l33t.

GM: Yes, I'd always be juggling different time zones. Doing it at night time there's hopefully not many people around. But there was one occasion when a network engineer saw me and actually questioned me and we actually talked to each other via WordPad, which was very, very strange.

SK: So what did he say? And what did you say?

GM: He said "What are you doing?" which was a bit shocking. I told him I was from Military Computer Security, which he fully believed.

What more, I find it very interesting that the decision regarding the fate of Mr McKinnon isn't being decided based on the evidence from the US military, but rather on whether or not it is democratically legal to extradite a UK citizen to be tried in the USA.

The understandable fear is that Mr McKinnon will have the fate of a "terrorist" and wind up in Gitmo. There have been assurances that he would be tried by a federal court in Virgina.

Mr McKinnon has been charged with breaking in to a series of US military and government computer networks between February 2001 and March 2002. The US alleges that during his hacking spree he caused $700,000 (£375,235) of damage. One network he damaged took more than a month to repair, says the US.

"If he really wanted to damage the US military he had ample opportunity to do that," said the editor of the Free Gary blog, pointing out that Mr McKinnon had access to the networks for a long time before he was caught.

However, said the blog co-ordinator, none of this evidence had been presented to a British court to scrutinise. Instead UK courts considering Mr McKinnon's case have been debating the legality of the US extradition request.

This will only sell out the UK's sovereignty rights. They aren't the subbordinate of the US; they had teeth at one time and if they still did, they'd try Mr McKinnon in his home country. He was on UK soil when he hacked into the US military network after all...

Free Gary McKinnon - Or, at least let him be tried in the UK, and I agree. Everyone has a right to be tried in their home country, unless there is reasonable grounds on which to try someone in a foreign nation.

McKinnon supporters fight on
Hacker fears UFO coverup

Hits & Popularity: Overrated

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Popularity and hits are overrated, when it comes to blogs and websites.

Yes, it's a good way of knowing how well you're known, but outside of that, it isn't that important. What matters more us reader loyalty and content. Having a blog that is nothing but blithering nonsense that gets a lot of hits isn't as satisfying as having a thought-provoking and sometimes ranty-blog that has a niche of loyal readers.

Google Analytics

I use Google Analytics. It is a way of tracking who comes to read my blog. I don't use it for the numbers because they're meaningless statistics. The only relevenat numbers are those which tell me the common browser platform and screen resolution. It helps me scale my images here to accomadate the common denominator.

The numbers are of no matter to me because I've always hated popularity contests and being popular because it says that I must conform, and I don't conform. I prefer to express myself freely rather than write what the majority would like to see me write.

That being said, no, I'm not abandoning this blog, I'm just making it clear why I don't care what negative people think. If they don't like what I have to say, then they don't have to come here and read what I write.





Yes, at first it's fun to see the numbers, but, after a while, they just become a blur.

I've learned something about some readers - people will praise total shit and ignore quality. Why? They don't know how to appreciate the finer elements of writing and so, thus, take to the lowest quality because it is all they can handle. This applies to almost everything, be it blogs, newspapers, news sites, novels, and even fanfiction.

I'm content with the reader who can appreciate quality rather than a gaggle who prefer mind0numbing drival.