"They won't search me, I'm white and have nothing to hide"
The complacency of a populace never ceases to amaze me. In the USA, you have one group of people who don't seem to care that the second amendment's being eroded because they "don't like guns", and other groups of people who are more than happy to tread on the freedom of religion rights of others, because they're convinced their religion is right. The violation of yet other rights seems to be a bi-partisan effort.
Now most people don't seem to be too troubled about the "Constitution Free Zone", because they don't seem to think it's going to happen to them.
What no one seems to realize is you don't need to be of middle eastern descent to have your rights violated, all it takes is for the person in immediate charge of passing you through to take any sort of dislike to you. If the all-powerful customs agent or border patrol agent decides they don't like the look of you, they can take a screwdriver to your Rimowa and bust it open with virtually nothing in the way of justification. Your shiny new laptop? They can rifle through that if they feel so inclined, looking for absolutely anything that the agent thinks - purely by looking at you - you might have.
The oft-referred poem by Martin Niemoller seems to be coming true in the USA, people seem to be complacent enough to think they have nothing to hide and therefore shouldn't be concerned - the founding fathers would be rolling over in their graves.
I'll leave the following as an exercise to the reader. If you are an American, with a few hours to spare this weekend, search Google for Washington's final address. Read it, I mean really read it. It's long, and it's filled with language not often used these days so it'll take you a little while to digest it. But read it, and if you have more time, read some of the other manuscripts of the time, if you're from the religious right, specifically read some of Jefferson's work.
Now contrast all the things that the founding fathers had forewarned that could go wrong with a free country, and compare these things to goings on today. If you are a political type, forget comparing the actions of the party you dislike, compare the actions of the party you like, the party you support, to the warnings of the founding fathers.
I'd be lying if I said it would make your job easier this November 4th.
If you comment too much, it makes your comments worth less
Well it looks like I almost have the spammers licked on Hungry Hacker Industries. I've had a couple of messages that look like they might have been trying, but it also somewhat looks like they could be legitimate messages - some kid got his myspace url in the subject line, and I'll add a check for that at a later date.
I'm having some trouble with spammers in my comments on this website too. I don't understand what's so hard about it, if I wanted a link for "What is zyban", "Phentermine review", or something else on my website, then I'll put it there.
In a surprise twist, my wife and I both decided to ban an entrecarder from posting their URL in the comments sections of our websites, after they spammed an identical, completely irrelevant comment on about 5 websites that we manage. Don't be a comment whore, comment when you really have something to say. A good rule of thumb is this: if you wouldn't leave a comment if I'd disabled link-backs, then you shouldn't leave a comment even though I allow them. That's not so hard is it?
I'm so f**king jealous right now. :(
A friend of mine from way back, Avi, who lives in India, went with a few friends of his biking through the Himalayas. I'm green with envy right now, look at some of the crap I raided from his flickr:
Continue reading "I'm so f**king jealous right now. :(" »
