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Cluster F*ck 2011 (aka Election 2011)

Stoss — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 18:14:15 +0000

Over the past few days I have been sarcastically tweeting out random crap about the upcoming federal election in Canada. The problem with this approach is that I cannot sum up my frustration with this event in 140 characters. Below lies the complete platform with which I will base my future updates on this matter.

If I had to choose a motto for this election it would be this: An election that no one wanted, brought on by a reason no one cared about, at a time when we cannot afford it, amongst candidates that aren’t worth our votes.

This election was not spawned by the will of the people of Canada. It was spawned because of a light at the end of the tunnel by two wanna-be big-wigs and their fellow sheep, who leapt at the slightest opportunity that may give them a hope of adding PM to their business card. I mean, let’s be honest here: Iggy couldn’t lead an ant army to a picnic; Layton lives in a socialist dreamworld where money grows on trees and the streams flow with gold bullion; Harper’s platform is more anti-Canadian than the entire list of our enemies combined; Duceppe wants to split up our country; and May has about as much chance of changing Canada as I do getting a blowjob from Megan Fox. (Megan, if you’re reading this, I will vote Green if you do, in fact, blow me.)

And while Harper being our Prime Minister may leave a horrible taste in most of our mouths, it is certainly better than him having a majority government and wreaking his particular brand of havoc like George W did for his 8 years on the global scene.

On top of it all, we are still in the middle of an economic crisis. People seem to have forgotten that because we weren’t ‘as bad off’ as the US or UK, and because it isn’t exciting news. So, Sun and CTVGlobeMedia have relegated the story to the business section, which no self respecting ignorant Joe Blow reads anyway. Elections cost around $300 million. That’s $300 million less that the government can do something with. To put that in perspective; the Conservative budget, which Layton and Iggy both said they would vote against, offered $300 million to low income seniors as part of the Guaranteed Income Supplement program! So what they basically said was that they’d rather pay for an election, which by all rights should result in the same government, than give money to your grandmother. If this isn’t abuse of power, I don’t know what is!

What these guys seem to forget is they work for us. Given that 165 of 308 seats house didn’t go to Harper last time around, it’s pretty clear that he isn’t the Prime Minister of choice for over half of the country, but that doesn’t mean we should have an election every 18 months to try again!

Publicly Private

Stoss — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:33:31 +0000

I’m tired of reading about people ‘losing privacy’ with Facebook and Twitter. People are not losing their privacy; they are losing their common sense. There was an article this morning in the paper which cited examples of ‘loss of privacy’:

1) A UK worker being fired for comments that her job was boring.

2) Employees in a service industry being reprimanded for posting negative comments about customers on their social sites.

3) Causing of problems in relationships when one person makes relationship-based remarks, or when a person ‘updates their relationship status’ without approval of the other party.

Hold on, none of those are examples of losing privacy; they all made their opinion public on purpose. Everyone at one time or another is bored at work. Everyone complains about idiots they have to deal with, and everyone has relationship troubles. It isn’t the fact that those people had those thoughts; it is the fact that they consciously made the thought public. Consciously making something known to people is not losing privacy, losing privacy is something that you didn’t make known to people, becoming known to people. For example, having your private diary published, or your best friend write a tell-all book about you, or a doctor telling everyone about your genital herpes is a loss of privacy. Standing on a box in the middle of Times Square and screaming that you have genital herpes, or handing out free copies of your sex tapes to strangers is not a loss of privacy.

If Facebook openly released all of your pictures to the general public, not just registered Facebook users or specifically your ‘friends’, then that is an invasion, but they don’t (I didn’t say can’t). In fact, they are putting in more restrictions around what can be seen.

We live in a knowledge-starved world. We put Tiger Woods on the front page because we found out he had a secret, but then scream bloody murder when someone finds out ours. We can’t have it both ways.

The sad part is that government agencies are spending millions to study Facebook for security holes, when in reality we live in a society that cares less about privacy and more about reading about our acquaintances’ lives than ever before. If something isn’t meant to be public, don’t make it public. It is as simple of that. Posting “I’ve had a horrible day,” is enormously different than posting “I hate my boss and work is shit.” Facebook does not require the same level of professionalism as a man in a suit in front of a microphone (but then again, even Obama called Kanye a “Jackass”), but it does require some common sense.

And you want to talk about privacy? Well how about laws that restrict who you can love/marry, in what orifice you can have sex, or upcoming flight rules that you can either be photographed in an ‘naked scanner’ machine or have your genitalia juggled before you can get on an airplane? We don’t live in a private society at all when a government can invade it like that. BTW: This is for another entry, but ‘naked scanner’ is by far the newest gross exaggerated term. Given the above two options I will gladly let a couple people stare at my colourless, featureless ‘naked’ body only to have the picture removed immediately upon exiting the scanner. It’s not like Playboy is standing behind them saying “Yep, I’ll take that one for our ‘frequent flyers’ issue.” In those pictures you are no more nude than that chick’s silhouette on a trucker’s mud flaps.

This last year 3 or 4 guys got caught for misuse of a firearm and animal cruelty because they did really stupid, depraved things to a duck during a hunting trip. They got caught, not because someone discovered the duck, but because they posted themselves on YouTube doing it. Had that not happened, the ducks would have decayed or been eaten and, assuming they wouldn’t brag about it (which is a stretch based on the video), they certainly wouldn’t have been charged.

Why haven’t we learned from this? Because we are not used to a truly global media. While screaming on top of a box in Times Square all of your dirty secrets certainly isn’t maintaining privacy, it is not the same as electronically posting something that within seconds the entire world can see… Until, of course, someone starts streaming your NYC rant. Which really poses the question, do we have any privacy anymore? If anyone can video/photograph us doing anything and YouTube it, wouldn’t you think that would make everyone more afraid than the stuff they knowingly post? It sure does for me…

Flight Sense

Stoss — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:08:07 +0000

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.

Trick or Hack!

Stoss — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:39:00 +0000

Regarding the recent news of the e-mail phishing scam on Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail (and presumably others) my blood has been absolutely boiling over the horribly inaccurate, sensationalistic comments that are being published in all sorts of reputable newpapers!

First lets be clear: These guys are NOT hackers. They are not. At very best they are clever people who realized that you can get people that are less clever to tell you things they shouldn’t. This is not new to e-mail, Facebook, corporate logins… In fact people take advantage of less clever people all the time. 3card monte in some form has existed for centuries and continues to fool people! Yesterday and today a fake Amber Alert message has been circulating the web, thousands have been fooled into propagating a false message. Tricking people is not the same as hacking. mafiaboy is a hacker. Kevin Mitnik was a hacker (although he was never malicious and wrongfully imprisoned).

The people who did this have done nothing wrong (I assume the lawyers for the above companies will disagree)… They asked for people’s passwords and the people gave them to them, I can do that right now: Please send me your passwords… In fact post them directly below this entry so that everyone can see them…. Sure they set up a fancy phishing site and sure they claimed to be someone they aren’t, but that is immoral, not malicious. Now, the people that use those passwords for malicious purposes are the ones breaking the law. Just as it is illegal for me to open your (snail) mail. (and yes, I concede these people could be one and the same, but it is important to distinguish that, which the media is not)

The problem, and I know I have beaten this to death, is that people seem to think technology is something new, and it isn’t. It is an adaptation of something. All technology is is an advancement of a previous incarnation of something else. Cell phones are an advancement of cordless phones, which are an advancement from corded phones, where were an enhancement on dial phones, which were an advancement on the original switchhook phones, and the cycle goes back to the first person to every tie a string between two cups. The concept and basic requirement is the same in all of these cases: I have information and I want to share it with someone who isn’t within sound wave receiving distance of my voice.

And finally, the calls for “increased security” and “more education” at these companies is absolutely preposterous. There is NO level of security or education that can prevent a person divulging personal information. How hard is it to understand “Don’t tell people your password.”? And yes, these guys used a sophisticated website to garner this information, but how is Google to prevent people from writing a webpage that looks like theirs? I mean I could mock up a Gmail page and have it be identical to it. How do you teach the mass public to make sure the website they are typing personal data into is legit? Well forward this Blog URL to 15 people and you will find out, because if you don’t you will have bad sex for the rest of your life! I mean after dozens of friends sending me hundreds of those over the past 10 years I am sure they all learned that that is a scam…

Contrary to popular belief, people do not learn from their mistakes.

What a Hack

Stoss — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:16:30 +0000

It was recently announced that 1 month ago perennial Stoss Blog antagonist Twitter had a security breach when a high ranking executive’s account was accessed by a “hacker”. The hacker correctly guessed the users’s secret security questions to gain access to the account then surfed through corporate data and released it to well known techie sites. As the hacker himself posted: He did this to make people aware of the importance of security.

The articles I have read have used this as an excuse to bash the practice of “1 password for all sites” and the use of easily guessed security questions like “hometown” or “mother’s maiden name” which are ubiquitous it seems in the land of web sign up sheets. It’s almost as if some assmonkey whose only knowledge of security was the aluminum key that locked his pansy-ass diary decided one day it would be great if we could secure our most personal data using such totally secret, impossible-to-find-out data such as our pet’s name or the street we live on! Yeah, no one would be able to penetrate that code!

But I don’t so much have a beef with this. It’s security practices in general, both corporately and personally that are appalling! We focus so much energy on enforcing ridiculous rules that are absolutely unsubstantiated and yet no energy on the flaws in the human logic of password selection.

Here are the fallacy’s behind my favourite policies:

1) Change your password every 3 months & don’t use the same password for 10 changes

The genius that came up with this should be shot in the chest simply because it is now become the most ridiculous belief since the Hayley’s comet morons killed themselves to ride it to utopia. Would you change the lock on your house or your car doors every 3 months? Hell! Most people don’t change them when they move or sell their car! How many previous owners have a key to your house do you think? I have never figured out the logic behind this absolute waste of time policy that does about as much good as putting duct tape over your monitor to stop UV radiation. If someone finds out your password, they aren’t going to wait for 3 months then go, “drat, foiled again!” when it fails. It only takes a few minutes to download the entire contents of your harddrive, so by the logic of preventing data theft we should change our password every 5 minutes, right? If anything this helps hackers, because people are not random! We get lazy and append a number or capitalize a different letter to form our new password, so a hacker can guess for months on end and, once he has “your pattern”, will perpetually have access to your account. And this is the reason why not using the same password for 10 changes makes no sense! If anything this encourages using mypassword0 through mypassword9.
I also love the idea of “3 months” and “10 changes” seemingly being industry standards. What possible study could have resulted in these numbers being determined as the “optimal” values?
I love policies that seem picked out of a hat and then spoken about like they are a gospel to the industry. As if 91 days is a magic number for a criminal to guess your password, so better change it before day 90!

2) Password strength monitors and post-its

“Don’t tell anyone your PIN”, “Never write down your password”, “We will never ask for your password in an email”. BUT what we will do is analyze every character and tell you if your password is “strong” enough. Strong enough for what? To knock out Superman? To cut a diamond? We are talking about basic mathematics here. A password of length 5 made up of all small letter only has about 12 million combinations, throw in one capital and it is about 60 million combinations. Throw in a number somewhere on top of that and you are now at 3.5 billion combinations! That is a pretty big number. But consider most companies/websites have a 3 wrong and you’re out policy (A policy that does make sense), that is a hell of a lot of attempts on your password and if you can’t figure out after the ten thousandth time your account was locked that someone was hacking you than you deserve to be shot like the guy who proposed the stupid policy above.
The thing here is that the combination of letters, number, capitals and special characters is almost irrelevant, the most secure password is random, entirely random. I am still using a random letter combination I got generated for me by Geocities when I had my first webpage over 12 years ago. Sure, mathmatically it is probably trivial for a random generator to exhaustively guess it, most personal computers can do 1 billion+ calculations a second. But the point is it ain’t that likely! Just don’t use a simple dictionary word like “idiot” or “password” and you are probably in good shape.
I also love how secure it is that we are typing in a password that no one is supposed to know, but it can tell you “how strong” it is, meaning somewhere your password characters are analyzed. How is that different than me saying “psst, tell me your password 1 character at a time and I’ll tell you if you need more numbers or capitals, but don’t worry, my mind will forget it immediately”.
And of course this is where post its come in. The problem is not writing your password down, it is writing it down in the context of your computer and login. For instance:
Stupid: Writing your password in permanent ink on your monitor
Bad: Writing your password down and placing it in the top right drawer at the office
Less Bad: Writing it on the birthday square of your mother in a day planner you keep with you that has no reference to what that random word could mean or what login is associated with it.
Even better. Hiding it in a tattoo on your ass, written backwards and upside down. Of course you’d have 10 of them and have to re-design it every 3 months….
Writing a random word and placing it in a random location is not a bad idea at all! In fact if anything it’s a safeguard in case someone needs access to your data!

Locking all of your secrets behind a single alphanumeric combination is as logical as locking a door to a convertable or keeping your safe key hanging on the number dial. However in this day of technology we have to have something to allow us secured access to our information, and until we all scan our eyes, fingers and ass prints into a global database or want to prick our finger for DNA each time we want to read email, we are stuck with it. Be smart and just don’t fall into the trap and think that your security policies actually have as much bearing on security as they do on wasting your time. Oh and I know your mother’s maiden name and eye colour, so don’t use those as your “secret” questions.

Pics For Thought

Stoss — Sat, 23 May 2009 18:41:21 +0000

A few more day-to-day pictures:

Enjoying it while I can
The above comic was sent to me after my blog posts on Mr. Keen’s book about Internet media destroying society. The big-nosed guy on the right makes an interesting point, there will always be a need for writers no matter where we read our news. Interestingly enough, does anyone else notice the bomb on the hippy on th left’s computer? I am not sure if this is a subtle addition by the author that all Internt news readers are terrorists, or if it just a poorly drawn apple. I am hoping it is the later, otherwise I’ll have to learn how to handle anthrax.
A polite indicator	I want to thank the construction company for politely letting me know that if I am planning an emergency, that there is a spot ahead for me to stop and attend to that emergency. By definition isn’t an emergency something that is unplanned or unforeseen? For instance if the car I was in when I took this picture caught on fire, do you really think I would think to myself “Well, shit… I am not near an official emergency stopping area, guess I’ll keep on plugging forward?” Aside from the stupidity of this sign, I wonder how much this sign cost tax payers? I would also love to see statistics on how many people actually use these official stopping areas. Why does no one seem to realize when doing construction budgets how much of a waste things like this are? Let’s from now on spend money on paying the workers to get the work done faster so that “construction season” doesn’t run into winter.
This was a laminated pamphlet sitting on the table of a Toronto restaurant I was eating at. Making a leap I am assuming this was advertising something grown locally. I am not aware of what that plant is, but this was a pamphlet for wine and I am pretty positive this is not a grape vine or a wine barrel. Also I am kinda sure that ripping a plant out, roots and all, from the ground is not a sound gardening practice. What gets me is: Who would think that this graphic a) indicates wine b) makes me want to purchase wine or c) tricks people into thinking that Toronto has dirt and plants? I did not take any marketing classes, but based on my knowledge of print and tv ads the only appropriate place for dirt as a marketing device is for washing detergent, and even then only if you are advertising how it whitens, not how it protects colours. For the later you would want bright clothes that have been washed 100s of times indicated as a caption on your ad. I did not have wine with this meal.	Dirt, an interesting sales strategy

Greed flies high

Stoss — Mon, 04 May 2009 23:06:20 +0000

I have flown quite a bit, not a lot, but more than most and less than quite a few. I have flown on everything from “Can this legally be considered a plane?”-class on Delta to Executive First on Air New Zealand, one of the best airlines in the air. I have been on Virgin Blue who during a crash I am positive would charge you AUS$10 to use a lifevest and Swiss Air who end every economy flight with a delightful Swiss chocolate. I have been delayed for hours, over night, diverted to other airports, stuck on tarmacs, missed connections, been late for boarding, been held at security, had my balls cupped and man-tits groped by too many strangers to count and yet I continue to enjoy flying and still do not find it a task or an annoyance. I think it is a great way to travel and would have no qualms about booking any fight to any country if I wanted to go to that location.

That is why when I am taking a special interest in the articles about New Democratic Party MP Jim Maloway’s new private bill which has serious implications for all Canadian airlines (A summary can be found here).

Mr. Maloway’s bill seeks up to $500/hour/passenger of compensation for every hour delayed on the tarmac, bumped passengers on long haul flights would see $1200 in their pockets and “failure to announce delays” is a $1000 fine payable to the traveler. (I do note that the above is only if certain conditions aren’t met, but I will touch on that later)

But, before I start to discuss, let me be clear: For the most part Air travel is one of the most poorly structured and inefficient industries out there. I once took 3 flights in 3 days in China, each plane boarded on time, left on time or earlier and always landed within 5 minutes of the planned arrival. In the past 4 years, that is the 1st time all of those things have happened on more than 2 consecutive flights for me. What does this tell me? Well it tells me exactly the same thing as why in Germany I know exactly when a train arrives to the station, departs from that station and what platform I will arrive/depart from a month+ in advance, and in England, France, Canada and Brussels I do not: Some companies know how to be efficient and some do not. I do not advocate the Air travel business model of BAA in London, England, just as I wouldn’t pitch Canada’s Via rail as a good transportation solution.

But all that being said, can you really honestly tell me that every flier is worth $500/hr if there is a delay? That number seems to be picked out of thin air! What’s next? Making the Transit authorities pay you if there is a traffic jam?

Yes, air travel is rough sometimes, and yes it is expensive and yes it can be very annoying when you are stuck somewhere you don’t want to be. But this isn’t airline specific! Just as the clause in this bill that states an airline can be fined $10,000 if they don’t advertise their prices with service fees and taxes included. WHAT?! Canada and the USA don’t do that in any industry! And as stupid as that may be (especially since the vast majority of the world does do this and it makes soooo much sense) forcing one industry to add in taxes is asinine! If anything that will cause even more confusion, because customers would be expecting the tack-ons.

The people that agree with this legislation are the people that travel once a year or less and are annoyed that their plans are changed by someone else. If they were driving somewhere they’d call ahead and say “sorry, got stuck in traffic”, but when a hurricane is destroying New Orleans and that causes a two hour diversion to get to their margarita in Acapulco; Jesus Christ! Call in the lawyers.

Now Mr. Maloway says that it won’t cost airlines a penny if they meet the conditions. Well that is just bullshit. The airlines not only will need someone to monitor that this is occurring, but will also need to go to court countless times to defend that it has been done. What does “failure to announce a delay” even mean? What if I only speak Spanish or am blind and can’t understand/read the announcement? Is that failure? This all costs money and with an industry that is already so inefficient it is hemorrhaging cash from every orifice those costs ain’t going to be on their shoulders, they’d be on yours. So sure $500/hr sounds great, but when the flight costs $2000 to pay for all this shit, it may not seem as wonderful.

This is yet another case of the “Don’t incovienience me” syndrome that is spreading faster than Swine Flu (*ahem* H1N1) across North America. And for God’s sake don’t breast feed in public, or smoke anywhere within 10 miles of civilization or let homosexuals marry because somehow that inconvieniences me and we all know my rights are more important than yours.

What Hogwash…

Stoss — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:34:35 +0000

I mentioned briefly in my last post about the Swine Flu. And today I read that Air Transat and other airlines have suspended flights! Has this world gone mad?!

Swine Flu World Wide Stats

This picture was in the UK morning paper. Notice that the only place that has any deaths in it is Mexico? Yes, the US A just confirmed its first death this morning, but since I have been typing (According to word press 80 words), 43 people have died of cancer and 39 by communicable diseases! 152 deaths in 2 weeks in Mexico is not a significant number!

Now, please don’t take this as “Go out and lick sick people’s faces”, all I am saying is be reasonable! This is same problem i wrote about in “Tazed and Confused“, people don’t understand reasonable precaution versus gross over-reaction!

I am flying in the next coming weeks to Canada (13 cases), the US (65) & Germany (3). And now for my favourite part: Math!

Country	Population (mil)	Percentage Affected
Canada	35	3.4×10^-7%
USA	307	2.1×10^-7%
Germany	83	3.6×10^-8%

So, statistically 0% of the population. Last year globally 1600 people died by falling out of bed. Including 450 people in the US. At that rate the Swine Flu would have to be in action in the US for 1 death every 2 weeks for about 17 years!

I’ll take my chances.

Editor’s note: I just read another article which said the “US death” was actually a Mexican boy in the US. If this is true, are we really counting a death on US soil as a “US death”?

Tazed and Confused

Stoss — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:01:48 +0000

Many of you may have heard about the trial of the mounties in the taser death of some nut at an airport. I don’t want to minimize a death in anyway, and I feel for his family and friends, but many words have been thrown around about these officers: “knee-jerk reaction”, “impulse acting”, “instinctual” etc. and all I can think of is “Wait… What?!”

These are police officers we are talking about! In most cases all they have is a knee-jerk reaction time, or a split second to make a very difficult decision. We are literally listening to a group of Monday morning quarterbacks tell us what “They would have done” and that is absolute bullshit. I have never faced a situation where a person was directly threatening my life or the life of others around me (although perhaps I should get myself in those situations, according to Die Hard 4, Transformers and most action movies all I have to do to get the hot chick is save the world), but I can certainly say that my frame of mine would not be the same as having to make a decision about über-stressful work. Sure, hitting send on an email to an executive with the word “fuck” in it isn’t smart, but it isn’t a mistake that is going to kill me!

In the same regard, an actress recently died while skiing. A headline in the UK from this tragedy: “Natasha refuses £6 helmet”, are you kidding me?! A woman has died and before the dust settles on her grave we are starting to say that “helmet action is overdue”? The article I linked even says that 2 people who died (of the VAST 3 he talks about) were wearing helmets and still died! Dying is a risk of being MORTAL it is what makes life so much fun to live! if there wasn’t a fear of dying the X-games wouldn’t exist!

Everyday people die from smoking and car accidents, and yet we legally sell cigarettes and hand out driver’s licenses to anyone who wants them, but 1 famous woman dies and someone decides it’s time that helmets be mandated for skiing, what happens when someone dies after that law is passed? Is the next logical step to wrap all people everywhere in styrofoam?

We are so bent on saving everyone, that we forget what rational safety is.

Skiing has been around since over 1000 years! How could we have survived that sport for so long if helmets are mandatory for it?

Taser’s have been around for 35 years, and we are just now realizing that people can be injured by injecting them with electricity?!

Wake up people, death is inevitable and no bylaw or government mandate will solve that.

Few see anything wrong

Stoss — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 18:54:58 +0000

As always I have an opinion: The recent Virginia situation as before when this has occurred is being brought out to be a sign of the decline of society. This is because it is easy to point to a moron with a gun and blame him for all the fear in the world.

What you never hear is that the decline of society is the cause, not the affect. And this is where I step in.

We now live in a world where a 16 yearold girl with her tits popping out of her waterbra can talk on one cell while txting on a another and last night was rammed harder than King George’s 12th century castle during the crusades by the highschool quarterback who eats E for breakfast alongside a 6-pack of fine 3% beer and a picture of the American flag which he gives the finger to for 3 hours a day. And few see anything wrong with that.

We now live a society where anyone (as the shooter did) can purchase a Glock and 50 rounds of ammunition and have it described by the store owner as “an unremarkable purchase”. And few see anything wrong with that.

We also live in a society where dozens of twisted, murderous Hollywood movies gross billions of dollars each year and yet the shooter now has two “twisted plays” he wrote posted on the internet as “proof” that he was psychotic. And few see anything wrong with that.

And, we live in a society where you shoot 32 people and CNN does 24-hour coverage of the “ongoing updates” including: What colour his toothbrush was, the MacDonald’s employee who served him a Big Mac just minutes before the shooting and the climax of the story: The frowny face he used on MSN the night before to end his conversation with his German penpal. This guy got exactly what he craved: attention. And few see anything wrong with that.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not in anyway condoning or rationalizing shooting 32 people, but to have the chief of police and president of Virginia Tech stand on national TV and say that the shooter “was a loner” is just a sign that they would rather polish the knobs of a self-righteous group of spoiled brats and dismiss the sociopath as a nobody, loser, than address the fact that there is a large societal problem here.

Can stupidity be stopped? Of course not! And to think otherwise, is to disillusion yourself like the majority of the western world. It isn’t the fact we can stop it, it is the fact that we need to acknowledge it that is my concern. I have said it a million times, you cannot legislate against stupidity. It is impossible. If someone wants to do something dumb, whether it be to shove fireworks up their ass and light them, or kick a dog in front of a bus or shoot 32 people for no reason… they WILL. It is not a question of if, it is a question of when.

Stop feeding the fire with your insistence that only “loners” are capable of this type of massacre! This was a stupid, stupid act. In a society where we can accept drugs, alcohol, glorified media, depraved sex, horror and destruction as daily things that occur, do not try and convince me that a “loner” who was mad at his ex-girlfriend is the cause for decline in our society.

irreverent comments

Stoss — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 06:22:19 +0000

I have been gone for so long from this blog, my thoughts are now all scattered.

I find that after spending 9 or 10 hours at work on one of these things, I would rather watch tv and eat, then type more into a screen. Sort of like a stripper who is getting ready for bed thinking “Ah fuck, more work…”.

Why do VCR’s and DVD players have a Fast Forward setting that is so fast no human could possibly stop at the place they wanted? This is the exact opposite of the whole “Volume button that goes to 11″ thing. I think Sony needs to watch Spinal Tap to clue in.

Speaking of knobs, the heaters in my apartment are like baseboard heating at home, except that if you have the setting below 5, it doesn’t actually turn on. The English have a knack for creating the most complicated products imaginable. For instance: The toilet seats in the bathrooms (as opposed to the ones in our kitchen) are physically attached to the bowl. Not like at home where anyone with a screwdriver could swap it for the fancy seat that sings the national anthem while you crap.

I have to admit, I do love how elevators talk to you in England. Its always nice that after you enter the elevator it says “Please select your floor”. I was always confused about what to do while standing in an elevator before the kind computerized British voice cleared it all up for me. Once you press the button of course, the elevator assures you that you are in fact “Going Up” or “Going Down”. I’d like to hack the system and reverse the two sound bits so I could confuse the hell out of idiots.

I, as maybe many of you, recently have noticed that bots have found my site and decided to post viagra, prozac, cialis and other wonderful ads to my comments. I would like to thank them. I have never had such a hard, long penis, and been so calm while buying the cheapesr car insurance the web has to offer.

Sanity or Sanitization?

Stoss — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 08:21:26 +0000

As many of you who are faithful readers of my rants know, I have this very unexplainable obsession with hygiene. We humans have this insane fetish with being absolutely sanitized from top to bottom, so much so that we are actually making ourselves susceptible to worse diseases, by killing the very ugly helpers that eat that bad stuff!

What gets me the most is lining the toilet seat with toilet paper. When I sit down and the toilet seat is warm, I just enjoy the sensation… I don’t wish there was a cushy layer of “protection”.

We will spend hours rolling around in a hot sweaty lovemaking session swapping unimaginable fluids, then go wash our face before bed.

We blow our nose into 1-ply Kleenex® and then scrub our hands until he skin comes off. But five minutes later we grab a greasy burger, carry it to our booth on a “well washed” tray and then eat it and lick our fingers.

Or how about Chicken wings? Served in highly sanitized wicker baskets coated with wax paper? YUM!

We religiously check expiry dates, and then eat day old muffins from Coffee Time because we same 10 cents.

Humans are insane.

Social Commentary

Stoss — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 01:06:13 +0000

I have to comment on this article, because it shows a LOT of what is wrong with society.

I am not sure if you followed this story, basically because I have no idea who “you” are, since you are sitting at a computer looking at this at any time and in any place.. So regardless, here is the Reader’s Digest version:
Morgan Spurlock (of SuperSize Me fame) was asked (NOTE: Asked) to give a talk to a group of Highschool students about his experiences.
Upon arrival to the school, the school administrators asked him not to bad mouth McDonald’s because someone on their board own’s one. This in my mind is absurd! The only reason why this man has the little amount of fame he has is because of his research into how crappy fast food is! When he refused, he became the bad guy.
Then during the lecture, he reffered to himself as retarded, and insinuated that the highschool teachers smoke pot.
Two points here:

He is retarded! Anyone who injects that much McDonald’s into his body, without some sort of torture being threatened upon him, has to be! This is not an insult to the mentally handicapped people, this is an illustration of how freaking STUPID Morgan Spurlock is!
I dunno about you, but I think many of my highschool teacher’s smoked pot, and if they didn’t they sure as hell should have!

Because of his comments, he had to post the above mentioned article as an apology. Now I 100% agree with his decision to not apologize for the words, but explain that they were not meant as hurtful. He was hired to entertain. Making derogatory remarks IS entertainment, just ask Hollywood… Will & Grace made a sitcom out of that concept.

Some of the comments to his entry are from parents not even in the same country as him saying how ashamed he should be! (oh yeah, he said “Fuck” as well, b/c we all know that is the devil’s tongue speaking)…

Does anyone over 30 REMEMBER highschool? You used to mock the fat kid, the ugly kid, the stupid kid! And yes I mean you, the one reading this who I have no clue who you are! It’s a generaization that ACTUALLY works! Oh yeah, and I bet most of you once, just once, dropped an F-bomb!

The kids of the school wrote in some of those comments how they were not offended and how they thought he was great, and everyone else was taking this too far… these are 16 year olds being more rational than the 45 yearolds teaching them! The principal actually called them immature for laughing at such trash humour! TRASH HUMOUR! Turn on MTV! Listen to 50 cent! Morgan is a fucking saint compared the crap these kids are into!

It boggles my mind that rational people can be so irrational about a man who isn’t even famous! He is like Subway Jarrod’s evil twin! These two have the combined influence on society as a Canadian flee has on weather patterns in China! The only reason I heard about this is b/c of the uproar! Not b/c of the original comments! These parents are furthering the evil they are trying to defeat by making it more public!

People are starting to go insane. That is the only possible explanation. I hope there isn’t an insane gene that turns on inside me when I have highschool-age kids, because if I am considered sane now, you guys better watch the hell out!

Gay is not Brocolli

Stoss — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 22:07:56 +0000

When we were kids we had to be forced to eat our brocolli. There was no inherent reason why we didn’t like it, we just refused to eat it based on the principal that it was green and a vegetable. I find nothing wrong with this, because kids are generally nonsensical and don’t need to find reasons, because reasoning is a skill that should be devloped as we mature.

What I do find wrong is how adults can extend this principal well past its overdue point. But unlike a library book, the fee is not laughable. Adults refuse to do all sorts of things based on nothing more than a belief: they refuse to try the brocolli.

This is the root of many major problems in our society. Racisim, gay bashing, unequal rights. If people would give certain things a chance, instead of blindly forming an opinion, then the world wouldn’t be full of insensitive babies. Plus, if this happened, the French may cease to exist…

As we age, the arguments become more unresonable. Your parents could coax you into eating Brocolli by saying, if you eat 3 pieces of it, you get dessert, once you “negoatiated” down to 2 pieces, you got dessert. However:

This is a typical coversation between a leafs fan and a Canadians fan:
Habs fan: Hey man, why do you hate the Habs?
Leafs fan: Cause they suck, man.
Hab fan: Well, historically the Habs have a better record.
Leafs fan: Fuck you.

And…. no one gets dessert… but they may get drunk.

We have problems as adults in trying or accepting new things. People can try skydiving, white water rafting etc. But we hear about two men in love and we think that the second coming of the devil is nigh.

In short, we are adults. Act like it! You don’t have to accept things, but understand them before forming your opinion. Except of course people in hood, you just keep on shooting eachother.
By they way: For all the kids out there, eat your damn Brocolli.