There was a Republican senator on CNN this week denouncing Obama because “…he took 3 days to respond to the [...]]]> As we all know by now on Christmas day a man attempted to detonate an explosive on a flight as it was descending into Detroit. The media reported this almost immediately as a “terrorist attack”.

There was a Republican senator on CNN this week denouncing Obama because “…he took 3 days to respond to the attempted terrorist attack,” and “…was too busy with the war in Iraq and pushing his Healthcare agenda to care about airport security”.

Of course he fucking was! The American people elected him because that’s what he’d said he’d do!  Airport security is not a political issue. Blaming Obama for a bomber boarding a plane in Amsterdam is like blaming the Queen because Royal Mail lost your package. A government owned agency failed here, not the leader of the government.

I promise you if Obama was told “Hey, man… Some Nigerian guy is gonna board an airplane in Holland with a bomb in his underpants,” he would have called someone and said “Yo, can you figure out how to stop that from, you know, like, happening?”.

Also on CNN they had a former head of the 9/11 commision on who commented that Obama was reluctant to use the word terrorism and therefore was undermining the event. I don’t care if the attacker is on a terrorist mission or a deranged girl scout who was driven to commit mass murder because of an unfortunate cookie selling incident: If a plane blows up it is a failure of the security preventing that from happening, which is exactly what Obama said it was.

World leaders don’t have a red S on their chests and fly around at night saving damsels in distress, they are human, and if you think world leaders know everything about their countries like some sort of human-embodied-omnipotent being, then your sadly mistaken. It’s just like the fiasco of the environmental conference in Denmark. Sending Stephen Harper to an environmental convention is as useful as sending Andy Dick to a vagina convention. Neither know anything about the subject, except what they are told by their peers. Let people who know science sort out the environment issues and make a global recommendation. You wouldn’t hire the CEO of Canadian Tire to fix your car right? You’d hire the mechanics who he employs to do it, because they are the experts.

All of this is to use the media to enhance public perception, because in the end that’s what wins elections, and the Obamas/Harpers/Browns of the world all want to keep their pay cheques. Harper has to flash his smile in Denmark so that when the opposition puts their foot in their mouth for the millionth time of this parliament he can say “Well, I care about the environment, see? I saved my boarding pass!” And in the same way, even if you’ve never flown and have zero intention on doing so, having you PM or President stand up and say, “I am doing everything I can to protect you,” (whether from scary Nigerians or that pesky global warming) makes it desirable to vote for them.

The truth is, flying affects a fractionally small proportion of the population. It’s the media that portrays this as an issue of the masses and politicizes it. Restricting people from having liquids because someone once wanted to use a liquid for evil on a flight makes as much sense as making condoms out of steel because one in a few hundred break. (For more on this I suggest this article)

I am not going to die because a newly-wed couple wants to fly to the Dominican on their honeymoon, and you aren’t going to die because someone who happened to be born in Yemen is on your flight. We’re going to die because people die. I know we loving playing God, but in the end we all die. Whether a nutjob blows us up, or we have a heart attack after eating the large fries at TGIF, we will die. And for the record nutjobs come from everywhere, not just the 14 nations now on a permanent ‘frisk list’ by US order.

Flying is safe, don’t let a hypochondriac set of politicians and a fear mongering  news network who couldn’t fill a day with 30 minutes of actual news change your mind about that.

Firstly, a friend and former co-worker in his late 20′s lost his battle to cancer a [...]]]> I’ve been think a lot about death lately. Before you raise your eyebrows, it isn’t a bad thing. There have just been a few things in my life lately that brought the subject up. I’ve outlined a couple below.

Firstly, a friend and former co-worker in his late 20′s lost his battle to cancer a few weeks ago. I truly hope he is in a better place now and his suffering has ended. What particularly struck me was that his Facebook page for days was appended with kind and supporting words for him and his family, this was something I hadn’t seen before.

This made me wonder about the role technology plays in death. This blog is hosted by a 3rd party company which I pay a fee to annually. Assuming my credit card isn’t cancelled immediately and my passing happened around renewal time, it is fair to say that this page could exist up to a year after me. I am fairly positive Facebook/Twitter and similar web apps have policies around dormant accounts being deleted, but again there would be a lag between my last breath and my account’s. But once gone from the servers, all my thoughts, all my pictures, everything is gone for good.

Secondly I reference a conversation between Andrew and I on our trip to India. While Andrew is a friend and we know each other well, he certainly  wouldn’t know my parents, my home town and probably couldn’t remember the company I work for. This is no slight to him at all. This is the way many friendships start, and I could same about myself in relation to him. The conversation starter was “what if something had happened to one or both of us on some dark back alley in India?”

The easy case is both of us “disappeared”, because quite frankly that would be it. My friends and family would have no idea where I was. Aside from my odd email home to give an update on recent events, I never gave addresses of hotels or any indication of future plans. Truth be told as we got on the plane to India all we knew was that we were landing in Delhi, nothing more about the rest of our journey.

I read an article once about a man whose girlfriend was on vacation in Hong Kong. She txt’d him one night saying she was going to bed and was never heard from again. He flew over to Hong Kong with conviction that in a city of 7 million he could track her down. Of course as the news usually goes, I never saw the end of the story. 

That was in a city of 7 million, Delhi has 14 million. I doubt very much that doubling the population or even halving it for that matter changes the magnitude of a search like that.

But the case that is more interesting is what if one of us had disappeared.

Back to technology.

When I was in highschool a friend passed away suddenly after being struck by lightning. His closest friends created a collage of photos, printed them on large paper in colour and gave them out in remembrance of him. This poster still hangs on my wall in my room 9 or more years later.

If I fast forward 9 years, will my colleague’s facebook page still exist? Certianly not.

Technology is a double edged sword. It has the potential to bring us together easier, we can share photos, events, news instantly around the world, but in the same regard, once the medium we use to do that sharing is obsolete we have nothing left but a memory.

If Andrew had disappeared in India, I could have used Facebook or some other technology to find his friends and family and notify them of the situation. We could then use mobile phones, email, webpages, news media etc. to get the word out. While tragic, technology would help me almost isntantly get to the people who need to know, without me having ever met those people. 

The other edge? In 30 years we won’t be able to sit with our grandkids and flip through a photo album. Assuming our harddrives/USB keys/DVD-Rs last that long, we might be able to flip through them on the some antique JPG viewer. But somehow I think this is unlikely. How many memories have you lost because of a harddrive crash? A computer virus? A lost usb key or a misplaced CD? 10 years ago it would have taken a basement flood, or a fire to destroy these things, now it is as simple as a magnetic getting too close to your MacBook or a power surge in your apartment, or a thumbdrive slipping out of your pocket.

I am not a Facebook page, a Twitter account or even this blog. These 3 things are put into an infinite equation that makes up “me”. The fact that these will outlast me, regardless of when I die is a scary thought, because that means that in theory  instead of people’s last memory of me being the last time we met for a beer or our last day of work together, it will be my last blog entry, or my last update on Twitter.

I have been in countless museums and read and seen images on papyrus, animal skins, bark, stone… These are universal and although they decay, in general they transcend time. They are hundreds and even thousands of years old. You’d be hard pressed to find something to look at files on a floppy disk these days, and this medium was still widely used just 10 years ago, and jsut plain forget about the technologies the files on those disks are stored in.

I hope I remember the times I had with my friends mentioned above 30 years from now, hell I hope I can remember my own name 30 years from now… I just don’t want to have to bet on technology to be the mechanism for my memories.