Gotta love the politicians


One of the main Tory boasts was that they were the only party that could balance the budget. After all, their last budget was balanced, and thats about as much proof as anyone needs, right?

Well, turns out that the Tories misrepresented the budget somewhat. Wait, thats not totally true, lets call a spade a spade here... they lied. If they were running a public corporation, they would be rotting in jail at the moment.

Of course, as soon as I heard this, I was curious what kind of excuses the Toronto Sun would be making up. After all, their motto during the election was that if we voted Liberal, we would have to "hold on to our pocketbooks" since the liberals had no sense of fiscal responsability.

oops

Needless to say, I was not let down. Most of the regular columnists found a way to turn this complete fabrication into a bad mark on the Liberal party. The editorial mostly owned up to the fact that the Conservatives really pulled a fast one here, but even they had to get in their preparatory pot shot at McGuinty.

Cough Cough



No, thats not me thats sick, its my computer. I got hit by a worm yesterday afternoon, and I spent most of this morning giving myself a crash course in messing around with the computer registry. The most aggravating part is that the virus scanner I paid for could only tell me that I had a "type W32 worm" and I needed to do an online free scan to find out that it was a Hawawi.F worm.

The crappy thing is that I don't even know how I got it. I haven't opened any attachments in the last 2 weeks, and Evelyn is even more paranoid about attachments than I am. Time to get a better firewall I guess...

Celebrate!



Intriguingly, it seems that Egypt won the Yom Kippur war, it just wasn't ever mentioned.

You have to hand it to the Arab media, they never let anything silly like the truth get in the way of their reporting.

The timeless art of propaganda


As part of the Oslo agreement, the Palestinian authority was suppose to stop incitement (through the state controlled media) and crack down on suicide bombers. Obviously, they didn't do much about the suicide bombers, but they haven't stopped the incitement either.

Palestinian Media Watch has been kind enough to watch the state controlled Television and archive some of the more odious instances of incitement. As a random sampling, here is a music video (first link on the page) with a catchy song. You can just feel how strongly the desire for peace is. We don't need no stinkin' wall, if we just play nice, they'll love us!

I've decided that the quotes from my web page (the frames version) will come from the bible at first. That book is a metaphorical goldmine.

Wait, did I mean to say that it was a literal goldmine? Nope, I didn't, since I'm not an idiot. A literal gold mine is something you find around Winnipeg. The priceless quotes in the bible are a metaphorical goldmine of crap, and literally nothing more.

A good letter in the globe and mail today regarding the pot/tobacco dichotomy, from a police officer in Dallas.

I've always felt that drunk drivers are the biggest threat to my life on a daily basis. It is very unlikely that I will be killed by any other means. I think that the penalties for drunk driving should be approaching that of attempted murder. The trick though of course is enforcement. If the public views the penalty as too harsh, then they simply won't convict.

That said, I think that the public mood is ripe for a crackdown on drunk driving. As a society we recognize that drunk drivers are deadly and that it is a completely avoidable situation. A tough law should be prepared, and then when the next kid gets killed by a drunk driver, name the law after the kid and push it through. No politician would dare oppose it.

The Baby Boomers still want to screw us


Not content with having racked up a debt that they won't have to pay, people are still fighting against any attempt to partially pay down the national debt before they die. It is the ultimate in selfishness, an entire generation has decided to lead a parasitic existence feeding off of their children.

This is not new of course, for years the media (and the baby boomers in particular) have argued against paying down the debt, preferring instead (surprise!) to use that money for their immediate gratification. In the Toronto Star today (Thursday actually) the lead editorial was a rant against the fact that the federal surplus was used to pay down the debt instead of something else more in keeping with baby boomer morality.

Its nauseating.

Video Games and Violence


Proving once again that most people don't understand the difference between a causal and correlational link, some fool wants to sue the makers of "Grand Theft Auto" because a teenage killer claims that he got his inspiration from the game.

In a slightly related topic, I just saw the movie "The Lion King" the other day, and I have a compulsive urge to go kill my brother. Go figure.

Highway fun


Here I was, cruising down the 401, when some nimrod decides to go about 2 feet behind me because I wasn't breaking the speed limit sufficiently. Ever the nice guy, I look to pull out of the lane, but there is a line of trucks to my right about a kilometer long.

Ah well, guess the guy behind me will have to wait a bit...

Turns out though that he doesn't like that idea, so he starts honking me and closes the gap to one foot, perhaps he was hoping to convince me to drive into the trucks on my right. Who knows?

Point is, of course, that I immediately started slowing down the car. Once I dip below 100km/hour he suddenly realizes what I am doing, and figures that another round of honking will help the situation. Obviously we are miscommunicating a bit, so I slow down to 70km/hour. Perhaps that will help the dialogue...

Finally, we actually end up falling behind the line of trucks, at which point I prepare to go to the middle lane but he has already beaten me there. He swerves in and out, and sticks up one of his fingers, hoping to insult me or something I guess.

The moral of the story? Don't tailgate someone when they can't get out of the lane even if they want to. There really isn't any point, and sometimes you'll run into people like me.

Hopefully this makes my writing smaller

Religious nutcases still can't mind their own business

In a remarkable nondeparture from their usual "your business is our business" stance, the religious right has ordered that a woman in a PVS should have her feeding tube reinserted.

Theresa "Terri" Schiavo, 39, had been taken off tube-feeding six days earlier by court order, and had been expected to die within two weeks. But Florida's legislature rushed through a bill on Tuesday allowing Bush to override the court.

The real problem in this case I would hope is that the woman herself did not leave any clear indication as to what her wishes would be. That said, the husband is the obvious primary substitute decision maker, and as such his wishes should have been respected.



Just in case I ever end up in such a situation, this is my virtual DNR order. I don't want feeding tubes, I don't want extreme measures taken to keep me alive. I define my life as my ability to think and reason. If I have permanently lost that ability, then I am a corpse and should be treated as such.



Furthermore, I don't believe in passive euthanasia. In the spectrum of cruelty, death row criminals get a better shake than terminally ill patients. The first gets a clean, quick and painless injection. The latter gets to starve to death over a period of 2 weeks or more. Its completely unacceptable. If we believe that a given individual is better off not living, then we should administer a lethal treatment instead of caving in to the religious sensitivities of the few who want God to make the final decision. Frankly, if God makes decisions around this world, he's doing a pretty crappy job at it. I'd prefer to have someone I know and love making that final decision.

I don't mind if people believe this type of crap while in their bedrooms, but they really should not be inflicting this upon the nation.

In the top 9 headlines at yahoo, unbelievable.

12 hours straight of training. 'nuff said

The hate parade goes on

Demonstrating once again why jewish people will always need a safe haven, Mahathir, president of Malaysia, told the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the world's largest Muslim grouping, that "Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them."

There isn't all that much more to say. No matter how nice things may seem here in Canada, around the world, people still hate us.

Yanks win!

I'm quite the happy camper. There is nothing I would love more than to see the end of baseball, and I think the shortest path to my goal is about 10 seasons of yankee wins.

Of course, its interesting to be cheering for the overdog for once in my life. I tend to be dissapointed in sports, since cheering for the undergod, by definition, means that the team I am cheering for usually loses.

Long Weekend coming up

Well, I won't be able to work on my web page for a bit, I have a serious session of LSAT training coming up for the weekend, and thats going to take all my time. Maybe I'll put in a few blog entries to make up for it.

China is joining the space race!

Finally, after many years of discussing the possibility, China is entering the space race. As I have always discussed with Sina, I think that this is a great opportunity for mankind. The last time we had two countries competing our species made fantastic technological advances. I can only hope that a new space race erupts that sends everyone scrambling to be top dog once again.

I don't just think this is good, I think it is vital. If we don't get off this planet soon, humanity won't be populating the universe much longer.

Added justin's picture to my main webpage because he was so needy about it. Luckily for him I actually have a picture. Evelyn can't get a picture up because I simply don't have one of her in the digital form. She is losing her chance for immortality on the web... or something close to that.

Meanwhile though, I don't have time to do much, I fixed up the background a bit and now its time for Turkey.

mmmmmm..... turkey

Success for now...

I managed to get the links on the pictures working now on my main page. Turns out that it was a simple solution, it appears that HTML is case sensitive at times, and these were one of those times. Offhand though, I'd say its a lesson well learned, I won't make the same mistake again.

Frustration!

I can't seem to get a link to my picture working on my newly created homepage, I'm not sure what it is that I am doing wrong. At least I have a better FTP system up and going so it doesn't take me as long to figure out that I have messed up.

(sigh)

Time for a link to my home page

Of course, I might need to have a fake link since my actual link doesn't seem to be working.

Ok, I guess I have wasted enough time on this. I'm not sure why the one comment got linked to all the other comments, but I'll try to figure it out shortly, by which I mean some other day :)

Maybe this will work a bit better

Hopefully this adds commentary links to the site!

Margeret Weir was commenting today in The Globe and Mail on the effect of the Palestinian media and how it targets the children. Unfortunately, she got the webpage address slightly wrong. The correct address is: here

This is unfortunate, because typing in "Palestine Media Watch" brings you to this crap

The plan for today is to write the LSAT test. Presumably this will go well, and I'll be able to land a job with it. Regardless it is an interesting challenge.

This is my entry into the world of blogging. Sample topics will be similar to those I have discussed for most of my life. Nothing special, nothing ordinary.