Help the Iroquois get back in the blue

I don't write about lacrosse here very often anymore, since I have a separate lacrosse blog. But this is an important issue and, dear readers, your help is needed. I've posted this article there as well.

In 2010, the World Lacrosse Championships (field lacrosse) were held in England. A controversy erupted when the UK refused to allow the Iroquois Nationals team into the country. The Iroquois team is entirely separate from the Canadian and US teams and is one of the top teams in the world. The team uses passports issued by the sovereign Haudenosaunee nation*. Citizens of the Haudenosaunee consider themselves neither American nor Canadian, and have their own passports which, I believe, are accepted in Canada and the US and recognized by the UN.

* – Haudenosaunee is the native word for the Iroquois people, which consists of six Native American tribes (known as the "six nations") banded together in New York and southern Ontario.

Originally, the UK refused to grant visas to the players because there was no guarantee that the US would allow the players back into the country. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got personally involved and offered to grant US passports to everyone on the team but they were determined to travel using their own passports. Clinton then granted the team a waiver that effectively constituted the guarantee the UK was looking for, but they refused to change their minds. As a result, the team missed the entire tournament.

The tournament is held every four years, and the next one will be held in Denver in July of 2014. While travelling to the tournament will not be a problem this time around, the FIL (Federation of International Lacrosse) has decided that since the Iroquois did not compete in the last tournament, they will be seeded 30th. This puts them well out of the Blue division, which traditionally represents the top six teams from the previous tournament. Many lacrosse people, Iroquois and otherwise, are protesting this decision. There is only one reason why the Iroquois team was not in the top six, and that reason had nothing to do with lacrosse – it was entirely political. Punishing the team for decisions that were not only unfair but beyond their control only serves to legitimize the UK's decision.

It's not just the Iroquois team that would be affected by this decision. Lacrosse is hundreds of years old in North America, but it's quite new in a number of countries that are participating for the first time. Consider the countries that are just good enough to make it to this competition (think the German or Latvian Olympic hockey teams in 2010) and then find out that they are in the same group as the Iroquois team. If your position in the next tournament depends on how you do in this one, do you want to be disadvantaged by having one of the strongest teams in the entire tournament in your division when they really should be a few levels up?

The game of lacrosse was invented by Native American people many hundreds of years ago in eastern North America. The Iroquois people are directly descended from those people – in a nutshell, this is their game. Should the Iroquois team automatically be put into the top division just because of that? Honestly, no. But it does earn them some respect from the lacrosse community. That in addition to their play in other competitions should earn them some flexibility on the part of the FIL.

The Iroquois have earned their place among the best lacrosse teams in the world. They should not be punished because of a purely political incident.

An online petition has been created to attempt to convince the FIL to reverse this decision and allow the Iroquois team to play in the top division, where they belong. I am asking my readers to please sign this petition and help restore the Nationals' rightful standing as one of the top lacrosse teams in the world.

Update: The FIL has voted and decided that the Iroquois will be in the Blue division in 2014. I don't know whether or not the petition had anything to do with the decision, but it's not unlikely that the outcry from the lacrosse community was a factor. Thanks to everyone who signed the petition!

Security theater

We all know that the world changed on September 11, 2001. Obviously the events of that day were tragic, and it seemed that America (and to a great extent, Canada too) completely shut down for a week just to recover. Gradually things got restarted and back approaching normal, but in the months and years following, a lot of things never returned to what was "normal" before, and in certain cases the new normal is a lot different from what was normal before.

The thing that everyone can point to as being very different is security, particularly for air travel. Before 9/11, everyone had to go through security before flying, which included being interviewed at customs as well as going through a metal detector, but that was about it. Now, we all have to take our shoes and belts off, throw away bottles of water and contact lens solution, and either consent to being groped by a TSA agent or go through a scanner that can take naked pictures of us. To quote Timon from The Lion King: "... and everyone's okay with this?"

The site of the World Trade Center is now a memorial, but the amount of security required to get into it is unreal. It's not just a public park that anyone can walk around. To get tickets, you need to provide your name, address, and phone number, and everyone over 13 needs picture ID that can be asked for at any time. During the cold war we used to laugh at Soviet society, where anyone could be asked for their papers at any time, and thrown into jail if they didn't have them. Aren't we lucky not to live in a place like that? Well, now we do.

This has bothered me for years, but why aren't more people all up in arms about all of this? The belief seems to be that the additional security measures are inconvenient, but they keep us safe so we should just put up with them. But are we really safer now than before? The TSA themselves listed their Top 10 good catches of 2011, which mostly consisted of people trying to get weird things through security or things that would have been found by a metal detector anyway. No terrorists made the list. Early this year there was the cupcake incident, where a passenger had a cupcake confiscated because it could have been made of some kind of explosive gel.

The whole point of the TSA seems to be to protect the American public from possible-but-extremely-unlikely scenarios. Security expert Bruce Schneier calls it "security theater" – it gives all the appearance of providing security, but actually does nothing. You can't bring more than 100 mL of liquids onto the plane in case they're liquid explosives. So 100 mL of liquid explosive is not dangerous? And two separate 100 mL bottles (which are allowed) are not dangerous but one 200 mL bottle is? You can't bring a two-inch-long nail file (security officers snapped one off of our nail clippers) because it could be a weapon, but you're allowed a six-inch sharpened pencil. Then once you're in the air, they bring you your dinner and give everyone a metal knife and fork.

The TSA is supposed to be protecting American citizens from terrorists. But how many terrorist plots have they actually foiled? The total number of people killed in the USA in terrorist attacks since 9/11 is 16. Sixteen people in eleven years. This means that either all of the law enforcement agencies all over the US have been extremely effective in preventing terrorist attacks, or there just aren't that many. Certainly not enough to warrant the $8 billion per year that the US government spends on the TSA. While I acknowledge that it's possible that a number of terrorist attacks have been foiled and they just haven't made that information public, I suspect the actual number of terrorists stopped from blowing up / hijacking a plane is zero.

Back to the World Trade Center memorial, how likely is it that terrorists would target it for an attack? Obviously it's a very meaningful place for Americans so there's that factor, but a smart terrorist would bypass that entirely and just attack a subway station (zero security on subways, not even metal detectors) or a mall or, like in Tom Clancy's book The Sum of All Fears, a jam-packed football stadium.

If terrorists want to attack the US again, they wouldn't be able to do the exact same thing as they've done in the past, since we've got those bases covered. But if they were not idiots and really determined to find a way, the security procedures put in place by the TSA are unlikely to be able to stop them. But it's possible that not a single member of Al-Qaeda has set foot in the US in eleven years. In reality, what they're likely doing is laughing at all the silly hoops that they've caused Americans to have to jump through.

9/11 was an outside job

I watched a YouTube video recently called Loose Change. This is one of the most popular 9/11 conspiracy videos out there. The description of the video on the YouTube page is as follows:

For anyone who still has doubts about 911, weigh out the facts and the overwhelming amount of evidence supporting the reality that the events of 911 were one big set-up.

This exposes the lies, disproving every aspect of the bogus 911 commission report put forth by the corrupt government.

Judge for yourselves, but investigate the facts and evidence before jumping to a conclsuion [sic].

The video is about an hour and twenty minutes long. The film is professionally shot and edited, and there are a number of computer animations which are also professionally done – what I mean by that is that it looks good. This is not something done in the basement with a hand-held video camera by some conspiracy theory nut. The film states and attempts to prove that all of the terrible events of September 11, 2001 – the destruction of the World Trade Center towers and the airliner crashes at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania – were designed, orchestrated, and then covered up by the American government. It contains descriptions of physical evidence, scientific discussions, and interviews with witnesses, firefighters, airline industry spokespeople, and scientists.

It is also complete and utter horseshit.

There are numerous web sites out there (here, here, here, here, here) that address the claims made in the film in great detail, some of them point-by-point, so I'm not going to do it here. Suffice it to say that the makers of this film get many facts wrong, misinterpret facts and evidence (whether accidentally or intentionally), and use many of the standard logical fallacies including straw men, observational selection, appeals to ignorance, and red herrings.

For me, the most damning evidence that this whole conspiracy theory is wrong is the lack of whistleblowers.  If this were a government plot, the number of people that would have to have been complicit is immense. The people that flew the airliners (who must have been OK with a suicide mission). Pilots that fired the missiles at the Pentagon. Demolitions experts that planned and planted the explosives. Air traffic controllers and other staff at the airport in Cleveland (where United flight 93 landed in this scenario). Communications experts who faked all of the cell phone calls from flight 93. There must have been some firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and other first responders that were in on it, so they could hide or destroy evidence of the explosives if any was found in the rubble. Many experts in many different fields to come up with ways that this could all happen but still look like a terrorist plot. The President of the country. Numerous senior members of the armed forces, CIA, and FBI. Who knows how many other members of the Executive Branch as well as advisors and assistants. There would have to be people whose job it is forever to ensure that any evidence found in the future is covered up, and witnesses and others involved in the conspiracy paid off or killed. We're talking about hundreds of people here.

If this was a government plot, the majority of the people I listed above must have known about the plan, or at least part of it, beforehand and agreed with it. None of them had any trouble planting bombs in the iconic twin towers in downtown Manhattan that have hundreds of thousands of people going through them every day. None of them had a problem with firing a missile into the Pentagon. Even if they didn't know about the attacks or agree with them beforehand, they've had plenty of time since then to realize what they were a part of and reflect on their role in this event. But in the ten years since the attacks, not one person has had a change of heart and come forward. Perhaps the American government has had each and every one of them murdered in such a way that their friends and families didn't suspect murder. If that's the case, why hasn't the government just killed the makers of this film for revealing the truth?

The funny part is that the conspiracy theorists describe the most complicated conspiracy ever conceived, which was apparently pulled off to perfection, and at the same time point to many mistakes that the conspirators made and clues that they left behind. So they're saying that the most evil government conspiracy ever was pulled off by a bunch of incompetent boobs.

There was no government conspiracy to kill American citizens on September 11. The attacks were pulled off by a bunch of Islamic extremists who hijacked four airliners. That, my friends, is the 9/11 truth.

In which Graeme gets seriously pissed off

Warning: there are some expletives in this posting. Once you read it, I hope you will understand why.

On March 14, Wil Wheaton posted the following on Twitter:

To the "Japan had it coming because OMG Pearl Harbor" crowd that's crawled out of the sewer: Go fuck yourselves, you ignorant pieces of shit

There are a bunch of people on Facebook and Twitter posting the kind of crap that Wil is referring to: that the earthquake and tsunami that devastated parts of Japan was somehow payback for the Pearl Harbor attacks in 1941. People are even saying things like If you wanna feel better about the earthquake in Japan, google "Pearl Harbor death toll". When I first read this I was utterly speechless. Once I was able to comprehend that this wasn't someone's idea of a sick joke, I basically thought what Wil said above.

It saddens me to no end that there are this many people that think this way. The odd nutjob here and there I could see, but it turns out that there are lots of these scumbags – just click the "Facebook" link above to see a bunch of them. Luckily, since those all came from facebook, there are names associated with them. No more hiding behind the anonymity of the internet – now everyone knows who you assholes are.

First off, what happened at Pearl Harbor in 1941 was a terrible thing, no question. But that was seventy years ago, and Japan is now an ally of both Canada and the US. I did google "Pearl Harbor death toll", and found that 2,402 people were killed during that attack. Thus far, there are 1,886 confirmed dead due to the earthquake, and thousands more are missing. But if you're still looking for payback, perhaps you have forgotten that you already did get payback: you fucking nuked them - twice. The atomic bomb that the US dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 killed between 90,000 and 140,000 people and destroyed over half the city. Then three days later, 73,000 were killed when the US dropped another one on Nagasaki. That's between 160,000 and 210,000 people dead. For each American killed at Pearl Harbor, most of whom were military, Americans killed between sixty-six and eighty-seven Japanese people, most of whom were civilians. That's not including the hundreds of thousands of people injured or homeless, or the people that suffered for years or even decades with radiation sickness, or the children of the radiation victims, many of whom themselves suffered and died. The only nuclear weapons ever used during actual conflict were used by the USA on the people of Japan. And that's not "payback" enough?

I wonder if there were people in Japan (or anywhere else in the world) who saw Hurricane Katrina or 9/11 and thought about payback for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those people, or anyone else who thinks that innocent people who suffer and die deserved it because of the actions of a different generation, would be scumbags as well, but quite honestly, in terms of raw numbers, the Japanese have a lot more to complain about than the Americans.

I also wonder if the people posting this anti-Japanese vitriol realize the irony of doing it using computers and phones that are chock-full of Japanese-designed electronics.

If you disagree with this and do think that the earthquake was somehow caused by karma or that Japan deserved it, you are entitled to that opinion. But please remove yourself from my friends list on Facebook. You are no friend of mine. But even so, I'm going to make a donation to the Japanese Red Cross Society right now, in your honour.

Slacktivism

A week or two ago, a meme went around facebook where people would change their picture to that of a cartoon character and set their status to something urging others to do the same. This was supposed to be some sort of campaign against child abuse. But not once in any of the statuses that I saw was there any explanation of exactly how changing your facebook picture would have the slightest impact on this problem. Is some scumbag out there going to see all these pictures of cartoon characters on facebook and decide not to beat their child that evening because of it? Call me pessimistic, but I don't think so. Some may say that it was to "raise awareness". Who doesn't already know about child abuse? Other than the abusers themselves, who doesn't already think it's a terrible thing? Whose awareness are you trying to raise?

I'm not trying to be negative here and say that this is a problem that we can't solve so let's just do nothing. I'm not saying that people who do this are idiots. And there's certainly no harm in changing your facebook picture. But anyone who believes that this type of "campaign" will have any effect on anything is delusional. This is just another form of slacktivism, where people think they can cause real change in the world without actually doing any work.

This has come up on both facebook and twitter many times over the last few years: Copy this line to your facebook status if you know anyone who's died from cancer. Black out your twitter picture to protest a proposed copyright law in New Zealand. Join this group to protest <cause of the day>. Sign this internet petition to protest high taxes. Could the government look at an internet petition with several thousand "signatures" on it and rethink their budget because of it? Not bloody likely, but I guess it's theoretically possible. But how is changing your facebook status to "I know someone who died of cancer" going to change anything? And quite frankly, who doesn't know someone who's died of cancer?

Every couple of years there's the "gas-out" where everyone is supposed to not buy gas on a particular day (sometimes from a particular gas company) to protest high gas prices. This is not quite the same thing, in that people are doing something real, but nobody considers the fact that if Wednesday is the gas-out day and you were going to buy gas that day, then you'd have to buy it on Tuesday or Thursday instead. Even if they sold no gas on the gas-out day, the total demand over the course of the week would be the same as usual, and so there might be some momentary blip in gas prices but nothing long-term. This is proven by the past few gas-outs, where gas prices drop by a few cents on the day of, only to rise back to normal a day or two later.

Another form of slacktivism is the "ribbon" magnets people put on their cars. Many of them are for some medical condition or another (again, "let's raise awareness for cancer" – who doesn't know about cancer?), but some simply say "support the troops". These ones confuse me too. Originally I assumed they meant that the person was in favour of the fighting in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, etc., i.e. they support the war and agree with those who decided to send the soldiers overseas. But later I heard that even if you don't support the reason the American and Canadian troops are fighting, you should display these magnets to say you support the soldiers themselves. This makes no sense. Saying that you support the war is a political statement that many agree with and many do not, and some may feel strongly enough about their position that they want to broadcast it to the world. But agree or disagree with the war itself, who doesn't support the soldiers? What's the alternative – hope they die? Why do you need to put something on your car that says "I hope the soldiers overseas are not killed!"

Now as I talk about ribbon magnets, I should say for the record that I do have a magnet on my car. It's shaped like a banner and it says "Transplants save lives". I've written before about a little girl we know who had four organs transplanted in 1997 at the age of six months. This surgery saved her life, and she will be 14 years old in a couple of months. This magnet could be considered slacktivism as well, but I argue that it's not. In order to do something real to help cure cancer, you'd have to be a doctor or scientist or both. You can certainly give money to the Cancer Society (or the CNIB or the Diabetes Association or whatever); I do it myself and I will never argue that it's a bad thing. But all you need to do to support organ donation is sign your organ donor card, which takes almost no effort and costs nothing. I've done it, my wife has done it, many of my friends have done it, and if something terrible should happen to one of us and the organs are needed, just signing the card has saved someone's life. Not to take anything away from donating money, but donating organs can have a much more direct impact. If the magnet on my car reminds someone to sign their organ donor card, it will have served its purpose.

If you want to effect real change, get off your ass and get out there and do something real, or at least donate money to someone else who's doing something real. There are lots of charity walks, runs, and bike races, not to mention car washes, barbecues, and even 50-50 draws and raffles. Hell, I grew a moustache in Movember, which took almost no effort on my part, but it raised a coupla hundred bucks for prostate cancer research. That's about as close as you can get to doing something good with no work and no cost. Though come to think of it, I did change my facebook picture as part of it.

Smokers' so-called rights

There was a letter to the editor in the Hamilton Spectator today, in response to another letter from yesterday regarding the "rights" of smokers vs. non-smokers. Today's letter read:

We can debate this issue until the cows come home.

What I find intriguing is that non-smokers scream about their rights and their liberties, and how I as a smoker infringe upon them.

I say “ditto.” I, too, have a right to eat, shop and walk in an environment that is comfortable to me and not feel segregated or put down or looked down upon.

If I, as the letter writer says, wish to put as much nicotine and tar into my body as I like, let me do it when and where I wish.

Terri Hamm, Hamilton

I immediately wrote a reply and sent it in to the Spec:

You are obviously informed about the dangers of smoking and yet have chosen to smoke anyway. That's your right and I will not argue it with you. If you want to put that crap into your body, go ahead. You've made that decision. But while you are putting that crap into your body, you're putting that crap into the body of everyone around you as well, without their consent. Many others have made the decision NOT to put that crap into their bodies, and yet they're subjected to it anyway. This will happen if I simply stand near you - I don't need to interact with you or even know who you are. And you're arguing that you should have the RIGHT to subject others to your smoke?

If I want to drink myself into oblivion, that's my decision. But it's ludicrous for me to argue that I have the right to pour alcohol down the throats of everyone around me just so that I don't feel "looked down upon".

It is absolutely stunning to me that we actually have to have this argument. If you want to foul up your body with cigarettes, that's your decision and your right. But when your habit negatively affects my health, that's where your rights end. If I get drunk and harass people at the door of the local grocery store, I will be asked to leave and arrested if I don't. Nobody's health is in jeopardy here, customers are just being annoyed. But if I smoke near the door and compromise everyone's health, nobody cares and if they do, the smoker argues about "smokers' rights". I don't get it.

America is the new China

If you are an American citizen, you should be very frightened at the direction your government is heading. Last week's Security Now podcast talked about two different but related issues regarding privacy and censorship of the internet. Both issues involved the US government attempting to legislate away some problem that they don't know how else to solve, and in both cases the legislation will accomplish precisely nothing.

The first is COICA, the "Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act". The idea of this bill is to allow the government to force the delisting of particular web address from DNS servers around the country, so if you tried to go to www.copyrightinfringer.com, the browser would fail to look up the IP address for that name, so you wouldn't be able to get there. There is no due process here – the US Attorney General could order a web address added to the blacklist (which all ISPs would be required by law to respect) even without any kind of trial. This is obviously at the request demand of the RIAA and MPAA to catch people pirating music and movies, but the bill is worded vaguely enough that the AG can take down any site he wants. As the EFF puts it, "had this law been passed five or ten years ago, YouTube may not exist today". The idea that the US government is considering censoring which web sites its citizens can visit is more than a little scary. There are millions of Americans who are thankful that they don't live in China because the internet is so heavily censored there, and now their own government is considering the same thing. The really dumb thing about this legislation is that it's going to make it slightly more difficult to get to web sites on the blacklist, but not impossible. You can still use the IP address directly to get there, and all the legislation does is make the translation from name to IP address unavailable from US ISPs. I guarantee you that within hours of this bill being passed, there will be people outside the US creating open DNS servers and web sites listing the IP addresses of blacklisted web sites. There will be Firefox plugins that automatically check one of these other servers and retrieve the IP addresses that way. There already exist legal means to take down web sites that contain illegally copyrighted data. So what will this law accomplish?

The second one is even more frightening. The FBI wants the government to legislate that all cryptographic systems have back doors that the FBI can use to decrypt anything. Law enforcement agencies have been complaining for years that they can't do the internet equivalent of wiretapping because the encryption that is used is unbreakable. And they're right: the encryption in use nowadays is unbreakable, despite what you might see on TV. If something is properly encrypted using a modern encryption algorithm, the only way to decrypt it is to correctly guess the key that was used to encrypt it. This is called the "brute force" method, but because keys can be any characters and any length, the number of possible keys they have to check is essentially infinite. And the only way to know if your decryption attempt has worked is to look at the resulting data and see if you recognize it as something useful. Encrypted data just looks like random noise, and it's not even possible to detect that it's encrypted. If you were to encrypt a file twice, even brute force becomes impossible. Even if the bad guys guess the correct key the first time, they wouldn't know that they got it right because the decrypted result looks like more noise. So when they say "unbreakable", they mean it – without the key, the data is simply inaccessible. By anyone. Ever.

I understand that this ties their hands, but I'm afraid it's too late to complain about that. This legislation is doomed to failure because strong encryption routines are already out there. Does the FBI honestly think that terrorists will continue to use Skype if they know the US government can listen in on any conversation (which they currently cannot do)? No, they'll just write their own version of Skype using the existing unbreakable algorithms. Or they'll send email and attach encrypted files. The terrorists are not going to stop using unbreakable encryption just because the government tells them to stop.

Not to mention the obvious – if all encryption has a back door that the FBI can use to break it, how long until the bad guys figure out how?

In my job at Sybase, I am responsible for the encryption aspects of the SQL Anywhere client and server. If this legislation goes through, we will have to:

• immediately stop sales of our existing products in the US
• remove the existing encryption algorithms from our products for sale in the US (we'd likely keep the existing stuff for sales outside the US)
• obtain a specification of the new encryption algorithms that the US government will allow us to use
• implement them, test our product with them
• implement some kind of tool that will allow our customers to decrypt data that was encrypted with the old algorithm and re-encrypt it with the new one
• ship the new software and politely ask our customers to stop using the software they already have and install the new stuff

This is a significant amount of work that we'll have to do in order to comply with this law, and thousands of other software and hardware companies will be similarly affected. Some, like Skype, will likely need to redesign their entire product. The only impact will be that people that were already law-abiding will know that the FBI can get into their data if they want to. If there are any terrorists or criminals using encryption software, they just won't bother upgrading so they'll know that the FBI cannot see their data. And none of the above even addresses the civil liberties issues with the government being able to spy on its any of its citizens' private data.

Not a single terrorist or criminal is worried about these bills being passed. But American citizens should be.

Pictures from Toronto

I don't usually make a post that's just a link to another article, but here is a collection of fantastic photographs taken in downtown Toronto yesterday during the protests. There are some pictures of the peaceful protestors, and then there are some of the idiots in black with masks from an "anarchist group" (a contradiction in terms) who were just there to smash and burn stuff. If you really believe in something so strongly that you think violence and vandalism (arguably terrorism) is the way to solve it, at least have the balls to show your face while you do it. Otherwise you're just another coward.

As seen on twitter: "Nothing says "courage of your convictions" like wearing a mask and changing your clothes after committing acts of arson & vandalism."

I especially like the one in front of Foot Locker, with the anarchist guy doing the Safety Dance.

Gie's a minute for a wee blether

So there's this kid in Alberta who's graduating high school soon. His parents moved here in the 60's from Scotland, as did mine, though he himself has never been there (don't know what you're missing, dude). He's decided that he wants to wear a kilt to his graduation, to celebrate his Scottish heritage. Cool idea, right? I thought so, but his principal has told him that he is not allowed to wear the kilt to the graduation ceremony. Why? "It does not fit the dress code".

Now there are thousands of people from around the world who have joined a facebook page that are going completely apeshit over this, telling Jacobs to go to court, that his basic human rights have been violated, that this is a hate crime... OK, take it easy people. This is not a huge conspiracy against the Gaelic people. More likely, it's a principal who doesn't want this kid flashing his junk at people while on stage, assuming he's wearing the traditional undergarments. Don't get me wrong – I fully support the kid. Not allowing him to wear a kilt is silly, but it's not a human rights violation. "Scottishness" isn't a religion that he practices (which is why all the comparisons to turbans and muslim headwear and such are faulty), so I don't think he can play the human rights card. From the Globe article, it doesn't look like he's spent tons of time embracing his Scottish heritage – never been to Scotland and doesn't plan to go, never worn a kilt, that kind of thing. Now I've never worn a kilt either, and there are lots of reasons why his never having been to Scotland doesn't mean anything. But if he's trying to claim that this is part of his own culture and upbringing, I'd have a hard time believing it. It's not like he's going to get to his graduation in a suit and tie and think to himself "This is just wrong. I should be in a kilt." You want to take it to court, fine, but let's not get all bent out of shape and start calling it a hate crime. That would be insulting to victims of actual hate crimes.

When I was in Scotland in 2000, my cousin Hazel got married, and we were there for the wedding. My aunt told me that I had to wear a kilt. I think she expected me to jump back and yell "What?! I'm not wearing one of those things!!". Instead, I told her that it would be very cool and I was definitely up for it. When I was told she was joking and I didn't have to, I was quite disappointed. Kilts are very expensive, so buying one was out of the question, but I should have looked into renting one. I may never have a chance again. Ach well.

Big British Brother

What is it about the British lawmakers that they are so stupid when it comes to security? They already have more CCTV cameras in public areas than anywhere else in the world, and in the last few weeks, I've read all kinds of stories about how London Police have put up posters asking people to report those who:

• "study CCTV cameras"
• take pictures that "seem odd"
• don't give you details on their travel plans

It's now illegal to take photographs of British police officers. The London bobbies are probably the most photographed policemen in the world, and now taking pictures of them is a crime. (Note to self: tell Gail and the boys this before we go to London this summer.) I fail to see how photographs of police officers would be of any use to a terrorist. I don't know if this includes the Queen's guards at Buckingham Palace, but that might be a good thing to know.

Reporting people who take pictures of policemen or CCTV cameras is just silly, but asking people to report "suspicious people" is particularly disturbing. Like it or not, there are an awful lot of people who are particularly suspicious of Arabs or people who "look Muslim". Say I put my suitcase under my chair in the waiting area of an airport and then walk to the bathroom, leaving the suitcase under the chair. This is a stupid thing to do, but it likely wouldn't cause much concern. If an Arab man were to do it, there would be people screaming "bomb!" all over the place. Arabs (and other visible minorities) already have to deal with enough racism (blatant or otherwise) in their everyday lives, and these posters are just going to make things worse, while doing exactly nothing to prevent actual terrorist attacks. (Though the posters don't specifically say "be suspicious of Arabs", you know that many people will interpret them that way.) If I were of Arab or middle eastern descent and living in London, I'd be seriously considering moving somewhere more friendly to visible minorities. Like rural Texas.

And all the while, the UK government thinks they're doing their citizens a favour. This is nuts.

Obama makes headlines

How is this for cool? This page has a whole ton of newspaper front pages from around the world the morning after Obama was elected. Most of the headlines are what you would expect — "Obama" (with and without exclamation point), lots about change, lots about making history, that sort of thing.

Gotta love this paper from Portugal, where a picture of a supermodel is bigger than the one of Obama and McCain. And this one, also from Portugal, or this one from Bulgaria, where there's no mention of the election at all (as far as I can tell, I don't speak Portuguese or Bulgarian). But this one combines the "best" of both worlds — a scantily-clad woman and no mention of Obama!

That last one isn't from Portugal, it's from Brazil — where they speak Portuguese. What does that tell you about Portuguese people? They like women in bathing suits and don't care about American politics. Can't fault them for that. Next vacation — Rio de Janeiro? Hmmmm....

Obama makes history

First off, congratulations to US President-elect Barack Obama. I don't follow American politics all that much (hell, I don't follow Canadian politics all that much), but I do like what I've heard from Obama in the past, and I'm also glad that a nutcase like Palin will not be VP. I've heard of a lot of Americans who are truly excited and optimistic about their future with their new President, probably for the first time in many years.

But onto the reason for the title of this entry. You might think that Obama is just another politician, just like every other guy who's been elected President. But there's something different about him, something that makes him stand apart from every other President the US has ever had. Yes, it's true: Barack Obama has won two Grammy awards, both for Best Spoken Word Album. As far as I can tell, no other President has ever won a Grammy award.

To be fair, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter have each won a Grammy award, also for spoken word performances, but they both won theirs after being President. Hillary Rodham Clinton has also won one, so perhaps in four years...

And what is your business in the United States, Mr. bin Laden?

A Canadian man whose name got on the US no-fly list has legally changed it to avoid hassles whenever he flies. Because of identity theft, every time he went through customs in the US, he'd be pulled aside and questioned, sometimes for hours. So after enduring this for years as well as complaining to the TSA who said that they couldn't (or wouldn't) remove his name, he legally changed it, and now he's fine. Good thing the terrorists don't know about this idea.

This no-fly rule that's based solely on someone's name is just ludicrous in the first place. Names are not globally unique and can be easily faked. There have been stories of seven-year-old children being stopped and questioned because their names show up on a no-fly list. Senator Edward Kennedy's name made it onto a watch list at one point, and a couple of times he was told he couldn't board the plane. In all cases he eventually did get on the plane thanks to the fact that the supervisor recognized him. He managed to get his name removed after a couple of weeks, but the average person can't just call up the DHS chief and say "Hi Tom, Ted here. Get my name off of your f**king list. Thanks."

Terrorists may be misguided, brainwashed, or just plain evil, but you can't say that they're all stupid. What terrorist is going to be flying under his real name? The well-funded terrorists can probably get fake passports made in hours with any name they want and if they're smart, they never fly under the same name twice.

Yet another example of how the US government is turning the "war on terror" into a complete joke. I'm not talking about the actual fighting in Afghanistan, more the silly restrictions that keep popping up everywhere. You can't bring more than 100 mL of shampoo in your carry-on, but a bottle of water or contact lens solution (even more than 100 mL!) is OK. Do they check the contents of the bottle of water or contact lens solution? If you're going to bring liquid explosives onboard, just put it into a contact lens solution bottle and you're fine. You can't bring a nail file because it could be used as a weapon, but a sharpened pencil is fine. Now they can confiscate any electronic device like a laptop and even an iPod without reasonable suspicion of anything, and without even explaining why they're doing it.

How does any of this make people safer when flying? These are silly rules that do nothing but inconvenience innocent civilians. The actual terrorists can easily get around them and thus they provide no security.

As I said once before, "The terrorists may not have succeeded in significantly affecting the Western economies or changing government policies on anything (which, presumably, is at least one of their goals), but I'm sure they're all having a good laugh at the stupid policies that have resulted from their activities." I read a comment on Bruce Schneier's blog that sums it up perfectly:

The purpose of terrorism is to create terror.

Mission accomplished.

Gail's television debut

The drama with the school issue I wrote about before continues. There was a meeting at the high school last night, where over 100 parents and members of various school councils (including Gail) met to brainstorm on ideas of how to best solve the problems at the high school and Greenleaf without busing our kids away. Each participant with an idea wrote it down on a piece of paper, and Gail now has a huge stack of paper here with lots of different ideas. One of the "rules" for this meeting is that any idea was to be submitted, even if you thought it was silly or impossible, so some of the ideas are pretty "out there", but it was great to see a lot of people come out and not only show their support but voice their opinions. Gail, some other Greenleaf council people, and members of other school councils will be meeting with our school board trustees next week.

Someone called the local TV channel and they sent a team up to the meeting. A few people, including Gail, were interviewed and appeared on last night's 11:00 news. Since this was Gail television debut, I'm trying to find a link to the video online, but no dice yet. We did tape it (with actual video tape, no PVR yet...), so I suppose I could record it from there onto the video camera, and then transfer from that onto the computer, but I'm sleepy. Maybe tomorrow. She was also interviewed the other day for the local paper, and that story came out today.

Save Greenleaf!

I don't write too much political stuff here. This is mainly because I don't follow politics all that closely, and I don't have strong opinions on a lot of political issues. However, there's a local issue that's recently come up that I really have to write about, since it directly affects my family, specifically my kids.

My kids go to Allan A. Greenleaf Elementary School, and Gail is the chair of the school council there (and has been for four years). They love the school, and Gail and I have grown to know the school and its staff pretty well. Over the years that Gail has been on the council, there have been lots of events intended to bring parents into the school and foster a real feeling of community: in particular the annual spaghetti dinner and silent auction which raises a ton of money for the school, and free family movie night.

Greenleaf is right next to Waterdown District High School (WDHS), the only high school in town. They share a parking lot, and there are a bunch of portables between them. WDHS has over 1200 1400 students, and is severely overcrowded; they have an astounding 29 18 portables scattered around the school grounds. They have to expand the school, there's no question about that. The school grounds, which includes the high school, Greenleaf, and also the local YMCA, is bordered on the south by a fairly major street, and on the other three sides by farmland, all of which is owned by a developer. The school board has been in negotiations with this developer for years to buy some of the land next to the school so that they can expand. This deal recently fell through. I'm not going to comment on that, since I know none of the details of the bargaining, but the end result is that the school will have to expand on its existing land.

Here is a Google satellite map of the area. You can see the high school at the top right, Greenleaf at the top left, and the YMCA at the bottom left. The picture must have been taken a little while ago — I can only see 11 portables at the high school, and only two at Greenleaf, which now has eight or nine.

The board has come up with two plans to solve this problem: (1) build extensions onto WDHS, or (2) take over Greenleaf and make it part of the high school. If they go for option (2), they then have to decide what to do with the 700 kids that currently go to Greenleaf. The two options there are (2a) bus the kids to two currently empty schools in Dundas (~10-15 km away) while they build new schools in Waterdown for them to return to, or (2b) scatter the kids between the other three elementary schools in Waterdown. Either way, the school spirit and environment that they've built over the years will vanish, as Greenleaf will cease to exist. In option 2a, at least most of the kids and staff will be moved en masse so the environment would be similar, but they'd still be split in half and they wouldn't be going to school in Waterdown. They'd be moving to older schools that have been abandoned and stripped (everything from the air conditioners to the fire bells have been removed). Also, there is no timetable for when they might return to Waterdown — the board doesn't currently even own any land on which they can build a new school.

The board did mention another "unofficial" option: expropriate the land from the developer. They apparently have the power to force him to sell it to them at fair market value, though I believe there are some legal stumbling blocks that make this option difficult. Someone sent an email to the local city councillor as well as our MPP asking them about that possibility. The councillor replied (rather rudely) and said that the city could not help and it was up to the board, but our local MPP said that he spoke to the mayor about it and would look into this possibility. The MPP was helpful and polite, the councillor was unhelpful and rude. One of those two has announced that they will not be running for re-election next time around — three guesses which one, and the first two don't count.

Option 1 (building additions to the high school) is not without its problems either. The renovations will take two years, during which time the high school students and the Greenleaf students will be going to school in a construction zone. There is only one entrance/exit into the school/YMCA area, so the school parents and staff and YMCA visitors and staff will be using the same entrance as the construction vehicles, and part of the plans include building a second storey above an existing one. While that's happening, students will not be able to use the first floor of those areas.

The board has not stated which of the options they are leaning towards. They held a public information meeting at WDHS last Wednesday where they outlined the options. Lots of Greenleaf staff members and parents were there. Gail tore a muscle in her calf on Tuesday night and spent three hours in the hospital on Wednesday, but even the inability to walk didn't keep her away from this meeting. She hobbled in on crutches to make sure she knew exactly what the options were so that she could present them to council at the regular council meeting the next night. The result of that (second) meeting was that the parents and staff are pretty much united that we don't want to lose our school. We understand that the high school needs to expand, but the option of taking over Greenleaf and busing 700 kids to Dundas or scattering them among the three already-crowded Waterdown schools is simply not acceptable.

At the meeting, a third option was proposed, which will be presented to the school board. The original option (2) was to move the kids to an abandoned school, expand the high school, and then build a new school for the Greenleaf kids to come back to. We submit option 3: the construction should simply be ordered differently. Build a new school, move the Greenleaf students there, and then let the high school take over Greenleaf. The high school is apparently big enough to handle the current student load for another couple of years, so they'll be OK during the construction of a new school, the Greenleaf students and staff don't get scattered to the four winds, and after the new school is built, the high school can take over Greenleaf and grow as necessary. Everyone wins.

Greenleaf was built because a group of Waterdown parents wanted a new elementary school and formed a group to look into the possibility. The parents group contacted developers and did most of the legwork and then presented their findings to the board, and Greenleaf was built within two years. Given that, here's no reason a new school couldn't be built within the same two year time frame.

Disclaimer: My wife Gail Perrow is the chair of the Allan A. Greenleaf school council. The opinions expressed here are my own. I am not speaking on behalf of her or the council.

Update: Fixed some of the numbers which were inaccurate.

Just in case

This video is making the rounds on the internet. It's called "The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See", but that's a bit strong. It's about global climate change (GCC) and what, if anything, we need to do about it. It's strange in that the author doesn't try to convince you that GCC is actually occurring, but that we need to do something about it anyway.

The logic is hardly groundbreaking — either GCC is occurring or it isn't, and either we do something about it or we don't. If it is occurring and we take action, we're good, and if it is not occurring and we do nothing, we're good. The two risks are the crux of the argument, and he describes the two extreme cases. If GCC is occurring and we don't take action, ocean levels will rise, wiping out entire cities or possibly countries, millions of people will die and millions more will be homeless, there's worldwide economic, political, and social chaos, and life generally will suck. If it is not occurring and we do take action, we could be spending billions of dollars solving a problem that doesn't exist and we cause a worldwide economic depression. The latter is certainly the lesser of the two evils, so we need to take action against GCC, "just in case". I have no real problem with that logic, and am happy to do my share to help.

Am I going to become a vegan or vegetarian because the more meat we eat, the more cows there are, and the more cows there are, the more gas they release, thereby contributing to global warming? No, because I don't think that cow farts are really that big of a problem. I have actually seen this reasoning in defence of veganism, by the way.

Anyway, the logic he used reminded me of religion. I think a large number of people believe in God "just in case". They figure that if God exists and I don't believe, then I get to sleep in on Sundays, but I'm going to hell. If God does not exist, and I do believe, then I've wasted** my Sunday mornings and not much else. Going to hell is obviously worse, so I'll go to church. I know that there are a much larger number of faithful church-goers who believe wholeheartedly in God, and this is not something they think about — God not existing is not an option in their mind. But I think the number of "just-in-case"ers is not insignificant.

Personally, I am as "devout" an atheist as the aforementioned "faithful" are devout Christians (or Jews or Muslims or...), so the option of "God exists but I don't believe so I'm going to hell" doesn't exist in my mind. In fact, I used to be a just-in-case'er myself, back before I "came out" as an atheist. It seems that some consider "atheist" one of the worst insults you could use, like "anti-American" (or its equivalent, "terrorist") seems to be these days. Once I decided that the word "atheist" was not an insult and accurately described me, I dropped the whole "just-in-case" thing.

But the just-in-case'ers seem to be missing one crucial point. If God does exist, then he knows you're a just-in-case'er, that you don't really believe with all your heart, so you're going to hell anyway. In that case, you've wasted your Sunday mornings and you're going to hell. Worst of both worlds.

** - I also realize that people do more at church than simply pray. They learn valuable life lessons during sermons, meet people and make friends, perhaps get advice or counselling, etc. I talked with someone once who said that her mother was "the biggest atheist around", but still went to church on Sundays because she simply enjoyed it. I'm sure a lot of the just-in-case'ers really enjoy their church-going time, and from that point of view it's certainly not "wasted time". But you know what I mean.

Tory the Tory and MMP

So we go to the polls on Wednesday, this time casting two ballots instead of the usual one. I think I've figured out who I'm voting for in my riding, and I think I've also figured out how I'm voting on the MMP issue. I see the appeal of MMP, particularly for the smaller parties. For example, there is no Green Party candidate in my riding, and if I were a Green Party supporter (I'm not), then I would have no way to actually vote for the party. With MMP, I could still support that party. Similarly, say I happen to support Party X but for whatever reason I don't like Party X's candidate in my riding. Under an MMP system, I could vote for the candidate (not party) that I think will best serve my riding, while still supporting Party X.

The fatal flaw of MMP in my mind is that 40 of 130 MPPs (that's over 30%) will be unelected and will represent no constituents. They are guaranteed to vote along party lines. Most MPPs will, to be sure, but there is always the chance that they will not if whatever they are voting on may be especially helpful or detrimental to their constituents. Voting along party lines is not necessarily a problem, but if there's something to be voted on, and Joe Party Leader says "my party is against this", he knows that those extra unelected MPPs will vote with him, so he could have 25% of the vote before anyone even considers about how the people of the province feel about it. Because there are more MPPs, it also means that the person voting on my behalf (i.e. my MPP) has less power than under the current system, in the sense that his vote will count for less. Everyone I've talked to on this issue (which, admittedly, isn't many) is also voting no.

I generally don't align myself with a particular party, mainly because I don't trust many politicians, and the ones I have trusted in the past have come from various parties. If I found that I trusted, say, the Librerals more often than the Tories, then I might call myself a Liberal, but I've noticed no such pattern. In particular, I've found in the past that I like the federal leader of a party while not liking the provincial leader of that same party, or vice versa. I did not watch the recent debate on TV, but I've heard interviews with both McGuinty and Tory, and I liked what each of them had to say (though it's probably easy to spin your agenda to sound positive when there's nobody arguing against you). Plus, my political knowledge is minimal enough that if some political leader explained an idea to me, I wouldn't necessarily be able to see any flaws in it anyway. Having said that, I have yet to see a John Tory ad that explains why he would be a good leader; all of his ads seem to just talk about why McGuinty is not a good leader. It's not "Vote for us!", it's "Don't vote for them!", which implies to me that either (a) Tory isn't confident enough in his own agenda to actually talk about it, or (b) he doesn't think there are any really good candidates, including himself, so he considers himself the "least bad" candidate. Either way, this is hardly someone I want leading the province for the next however-many years.

As an aside, obviously a politician named "Tory" would be a Conservative. But what if he wasn't? Would the Liberal Party elect a leader named "Tory"?

Look at this, more political commentary on my blog. Somewhere, John Wayne Gacy and Joseph Stalin are putting on parkas.

Going green - what's the point?

I heard an interview today on the Quirks and Quarks podcast with an environment economist named Dr. Mark Jaccard who was talking about how we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He was talking about how critical it is to do this, and how governments need to do much more to make it happen. The Canadian government set some unrealistic goals with respect to the Kyoto protocol (the goal was to reduce total emissions in 2010 to 6% less than the 1990 totals — we are currently at 25-30% above), and then did nothing to help achieve those goals except some advertising, misguided things like rebates (if you give someone a subsidy for buying a new energy efficient fridge, and then they put the old fridge in the basement and continue using it, what have you accomplished?) and simply asking people to cut down. There have been no additional penalties for homes or businesses that contribute excessively to greenhouse emissions. Quebec has imposed a "carbon tax", but decided that the homeowners themselves wouldn't pay any extra, only the energy companies, which does nothing to make homeowners want to reduce usage, and isn't that really your ultimate goal?

He also said something that struck me as very unusual for an environmentalist. The host said that many people think that if they can be efficient and reduce their consumption and such, then that "should be enough", but Dr. Jaccard says in his book that efficiency and reducing consumption is not the answer. He said they are "a significant part of the answer", but that it would be a mistake to focus solely on that. I understand that it's not the whole solution, but the implication to me was that reducing personal consumption is such a drop in the bucket that it's almost not worth the effort. For an environmentalist to even imply this was very surprising to me.

I remember a trip to Canada's Wonderland last year where I was watching one of the rides, called Cliffhanger, which takes a huge platform with about 50 seats and lifts it up, spins it around, and drops it repeatedly. Then we went to another ride called Psyclone that had a huge circle of seats and swings the whole platform while spinning it, and the one next to Psyclone called Sledge Hammer which has six huge "arms" with seats on the end of them, and spins the seats while lifting and dropping the arms. These rides run 10 hours a day, every day, from May until September. I looked at these rides and considered the amount of energy they must consume and thought "...and replacing the light bulbs in my house with the spirally ones is supposed to help?"

Similarly, I remember getting a Drive Clean test on my Grand Prix, which was about six years old at the time. I looked at the test results, and the car passed with flying colours — one of the tests said that a certain level had to be below 1500, and my car's level was something like 12. Then while driving home, I passed a bus or a dump truck or something that was belching thick black smoke into the air, dumping more pollution into the air in an hour than my car did in a year. And I have to pay $40 for a Drive Clean test?

We have a test lab at work with hundreds of machines running 24/7. We do run a lot of stress tests so it's not unlikely that a large number of them are actually in use for much of that time, but I am sure that on any given weekend, there are at least a handful of machines that are on and running the entire time but doing nothing at all. After the big blackout of a couple of years ago, it seemed that everyone went green for a short time and tried to come up with ways to reduce consumption. I remember that some of us talked about ways to automatically power off idle machines and then power them back on again when they were needed, but nothing ever came of it. Then there were no more power outages, and many people forgot and went back to their old ways. I won't pretend that I am not one of those to some extent, though I'm definitely more conscious of it than I used to be.

We have not see the Al Gore movie "An Inconvenient Truth" though it's on our "should probably rent" list. Gail saw some snippets of it somewhere recently and the bit about the polar icecaps melting which is causing polar bears to drown (i.e. this is not one of these "If we're not careful, this could happen" things, it is happening) really struck a nerve with her. She went out the next day and bought some of the fluorescent ("spirally") light bulbs to use in some of our most-often-used lights. One of our problems is that many of our light fixtures use unusual-sized light bulbs, which are not yet available in fluorescent models. I've read about people who install solar panels on their roof or build wind turbines in their backyard and use those to power their houses. Some are even able to remove themselves from the power grid completely. However, the initial cost of buying the necessary hardware is very cost-prohibitive. From what I've read, it costs thousands to install this stuff, and then takes upwards of 20 years before the initial costs are recovered in savings due to lower energy bills. I'd love to do this for the good of the environment, but I just don't have an extra few thousand dollars sitting around, and therefore I cannot justify it.

I'm willing to do my part, and I certainly understand the logic of "one person doesn't make much of a difference but if everyone does a little bit, the cumulative change can be significant". But it sounds to me that unless government steps up and forces the worst offenders to clean themselves up (or at least makes it economically advantageous to do so), I kind of feel like any changes I make in my home are meaningless.

9/11

I'm late with this one — I meant to do this yesterday, for obvious reasons. Yesterday was the 6th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and I have to say I'm a little surprised how little was made of it. I expected to have memorials all over the place and articles written about it all over all the newswires, but I didn't see much. What I did see written was not so much about the event itself or even the commemoration events, but the politics surrounding them.

Anyway, I'm sure that in years to come, it will be one of those "Do you remember where you were when..." moments. For me, some other such moments were the explosion of the Space Shuttle, the assassination attempt on President Reagan, and both times the Blue Jays won the World Series. On September 11, 2001 I was working from home because of a doctor's appointment (allergist) in the afternoon. I was sitting in the kitchen when I got an email from a friend which said, in its entirety, "Check out cnn.com! Holy shit!" I tried to go to cnn.com, but the site was so bogged down that I couldn't get there. On my news headlines home page, I saw the headline "Plane crashes into World Trade Center", and I remember thinking that some idiot in an ultralight plane had been flying over Manhattan and clipped one of the towers. Maybe he's dead and a couple of windows got broken. Jenny must have sent me the link because there's some footage of the crash or something. Ten minutes or so later I tried cnn.com again, and still didn't get anywhere, but that's when I saw another headline: "Second plane hits World Trade Center", and I distinctly remember the first thought that went through my head then: "Oh shit. One plane hitting the tower might be an accident, but there's no way two is an accident." I didn't know at the time that it was passenger jets we were talking about, not little Cessna's or anything, otherwise I wouldn't have considered the possibility of an accident at all.

I ran and put the TV on, and sat with my computer in my lap for the rest of the morning. I remember that I was working on a new memory management system for SQL Anywhere clients, and that the project was eventually shelved. I remember calling my mother, who worked in an office building in Toronto, and she told me they were already sending everyone home. I remember hearing about the Pentagon attack and the fact that a fourth plane had gone down in a field, and thinking that the fourth one must have been bound for the White House. I remember going to the doctor's appointment and everything seeming surreal, like now that this has happened, who cares what I'm allergic to? That evening, I went to get the tires rotated on my car, and I remember the guy at the counter writing the date on the bill: "September 11th. That's a date we're going to remember for a long time." and all I could think to say was "Yeah."

I don't pretend to have followed all the politics afterwards. Everyone seems to be down on President Bush for going to war with Iraq under the guise of a "war on terror" when Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. It seems fairly obvious to me what happened. Bush looked for Osama for a while and got nowhere, and got antsy about not making any progress, so he figured "Saddam is a bad dude, he hates us, he probably had a hand in this", a belief that turned out to be wrong. But Saddam was a bad dude, and he did hate the US, so you can't really fault W for believing it at the time. The problem was that he acted on that belief before confirming it. By the time they figured out that Iraq wasn't involved and had no WMDs and such, it was too late to get out without admitting he was wrong, something that politicians in general and W in particular don't seem all that good at. I heard the other day that a survey of civilians in Iraq shows that many of them are less happy now than they were when Saddam was in power. Considering the nasty things Saddam did, that's saying something.

Oh crap — political content on my blog! Quick, must scramble to find something more in line with my blog's usual content... Ummmm.... New iPod! It's cool! Got lots of songs on it!

A couple of quickies

The headline in today's Hamilton Spectator is "New Weapons of Terror", along with a picture of various bottles: water, hair gel, shampoo, V8, contact lens solution, toothpaste, etc. This is in response to the new airline rules banning passengers from bringing any type of liquid or gel in their carry-on luggage. I'm all for security, and I have no problem getting x-ray'ed and searched before I get on a plane, but this is just getting silly. When we went on our cruise in 2001 (2 months after 9/11), our luggage was searched, and we were forced to break off the little nail file on our fingernail clippers. (Note that we didn't have to throw it away, we just had to break it off.) Nobody would have batted an eye at a 6-inch sharpened pencil, which is arguably more of a weapon than the nail file.

Here is a funny article about the next step in this "war on terror". The terrorists may not have succeeded in significantly affecting the Western economies or changing government policies on anything (which, presumably, is at least one of their goals), but I'm sure they're all having a good laugh at the stupid policies that have resulted from their activities.

On a completely unrelated note, I went out to Quizno's for lunch today. Man, do they have it wrong. Their food is great, that's not the issue; their ordering system is just silly. You get in line at one end of the counter and when it's your turn, you tell the guy what kind of sandwich you want, what type of bread and extras you want, and whether it's to eat in or to go. Then he makes the sandwich and puts it into the Magic Yummy Sandwich Making machine (aka toaster). You then get into a second line, behind all the same people you were in line behind the first time, and go to the payment counter, where you have to tell the person there what you already ordered. They handle the payment, then cut and wrap your sandwich and give it to you. Why do I need to give my order twice? This is the only restaurant (fast-food or otherwise) that I know of where I have to do this. What's worse - the first guy doesn't want your whole order, just the sandwich part of it. If you want soup with it, or a combo with chips and a drink, he doesn't care. Surely they can figure out a way to handle the customer giving their order once and once only. Every other restaurant in the world can do it...