My inane life… in glorious details!
Archive for November, 2008
Liberal Party Prepares to Topple Government
Nov 30th
The latest news just came in: the Liberal party and the NDP have reached a deal to form a coalition government in order to topple the Conservative Party’s current rule.
There are a number of reasons why I think this would be a bad thing for our nation. For one, the Liberal party is still divided and weak. Their interim leader (Dion) is weak. We saw that in the elections. For them to rule our nation, at this stage, when it needs political consistency would weaken our abiliy to implement effective policy.
Secondly, the Liberals approve of a stimulus package. Basically, to follow in the footsteps of the Americans. The American government is well known for making knee-jerk fiscal packages, which can actually do more harm than good. We can already see the cracks in the American implementation of the stimulus, so why follow in their footsteps? It will not hurt to at least wait and spend wisely, rather than be brash and just have those funds wither away into nothingness.
Thirdly, I’m opposed to the Liberals taking power because just over a month ago Canada voted, and they wanted them there even less than in 2006. Those voters shouldn’t be so easily discounted. If at least six months had passed, I could agree. But a month?
Fourthly, Harper hasn’t been a bad leader. He speaks well. He does well in multinational talks. The scandals have been few and far between, and quite minor. Politically, he’s also been pretty centrist, to win support from the left as well as the right. We’ve seen his compromises all throughout his first mandate. I think he’s been one of the best PMs this nation’s ever had.
Lastly, I don’t want the Liberals in because they’ve moved too far to the left. They were centrist under Chretien and Martin. But in an effort to distance themselves from the current Tories, they’ve moved left. When you go too far either left or right, you enter the realm of adventurous and potentially catastrophic policies. The Republican party in the states is an example of too far to the right. It’s bad all around.
Undermining Democracy
Nov 22nd
One of the things I truly enjoy about Canada is how we treat the political views of others. Reguardless of which side of the political fence you’re on, discussions on the matter tend to be civil. It’s only really in naive university settings where you tend to see blind adhesion to a political leaning. And even then, its limited. As a consequence, you can have meaningful discussions. The respect we have means that on a Parliamentary level, that we’re able to move ahead in a way that balances the views of all Canadians.
It is discourse based on issues. Which is why its always shocking for me when I see American political attack books at Chapter’s. The likes of “Treason: Liberal Treachery,” or “How to Talk to a Liberal, If you Must.” Books like these aren’t about societal progress, they are not about attacking issues, but about discrediting a whole political spectrum. By doing so, you’re getting rid of the meat of politics – issues and discussion. Instead, what you’re left with, is its shell. The shell is brainless attacks back and forth. The PR part of politics.
What’s particularly dangerous about this movement is that its undermining the ability to conduct political discussion, the ability to compromise, and therefore the ability for democracy to function. Because that’s what democracy is: listening to all citizens, of all viewpoints, to move the country ahead.
You don’t see this radicalism just with books. I get FOX News, which thankfully is one of those far reaching channels that no one ever gets to. That channel is nothing more than an espousement of intolerance for political diversity. The CNN that Americans get inside their country is not much better. What’s amusing is that if you look at CNN International, you don’t see that. They’re pretty much like BBC World News. It’s as if this kind of radicalism is targeted to the American audience, because they want it.
So it is little surprise then that the lack of understanding that such radicalism pushes forth seeds hate. And with that, I’d like you to check out this link.
Docks is dead.
Nov 21st
So, Docks is dead. It’s official. The hard drive that had all the tapes died. I still have all of the original tapes, but they’re messed up because of the skipping issue. Fuck. I can’t tell you how disapointed I am. I was really looking forward to trying to salvage this.
Here’s the script.
More Rice Tea news…
Nov 16th
On page 33 of editing the latest Rice Tea draft. When its done, this will be the last draft. The changes are very minor this time round, having to do with correcting the grammar and sentence structure. My mom’s quite busy for the coming weeks, so her further editing of the book has been put on hold.
Meanwhile, I changed the page structure of the book. The first page of each chapter now has the page number on the bottom. There’s more spacing on the insides of the pages, facing towards the spine. I thought it would be a bitch to implement these measures, but OpenOffice makes it all very easy (once you know how to do it.)
Next for Rice Tea.
Nov 7th
Rice Tea has been all about the drafts. At first, I created a series of handwritten outlines. In the beginning they were short. The one I have on hand from 2006 was 6 pages. These grew with time. Six pages became Thirty. Thirty became fourty-five.
I began work on the actual content for the book pretty much as soon as the outlines were done. I started writing that in mid-July, and I had a first draft ready in early October. The second draft was finished just finished a few days ago, about a month later.
So this is where we’re at now. Next up is a revision of the book by my mom. She’s not a hacker, nor is she terribly savvy with technology. But she’s a kick ass linguistics teacher, and she can spot poor sentence structure from a kilometer away. Actually, she’s plain kick ass in general.
I’ve been looking at the logs for ricetea.ca, and if I’m lucky I’ll get one visitor a day. Eh well. The rest are just search bots. I have banned Websense bots from the site. I was tired of seing their bots bomb my site with fake user agents.
Picked up the new book by Mafiaboy. I thought it could give me some insights on how the RCMP handled it’s targeted hackers. To that end, it succeeded. However, I really could not recommend this book to others. The writing style is very sloppy, with poor sentence structure and an unending stream of redundant passages. There’s also lots of fluff that’s in there for what I can only assume to increase the page count. For instance, he devotes three pages to describing members of his old hacker gang, elaborately talking about every single one. Also a sore point are the numerous comments he inserts to shed off his scriptkiddy image, only to reinforce that perception at some later point with his own words.
If you want to buy the book, buy it for it’s comical value. He really tries hard to make Efnet sound like some kind of evil hackerz-0nly club. He also keeps talking about how good he was, how much damage he had caused, blah blah blah. He’ll quote CNN many times over. He’ll use superlatives when talking about himself. It makes reading this feel like some kind of ego-boosting exercise rather than a proper retelling of the events.
Rice Tea – Second Draft Complete
Nov 5th
It’s taken nearly a month to do it, but I’ve finished the second full draft of Rice Tea. The entire text has been extensively revised.
For the most part, I found that I was being needlessly descriptive. I was also fairly technical about events in the book. Both counts have been addressed. I found that I could cut down on much of the jargon without affecting the content. I just won’t go out of my way to say that Seth downloaded the worm’s update from the repository of a honeypot project.
US Threats on visa-only entry.
Nov 1st
So our big neighbour to the south is threatning Canada with visa-only access into the country unless they get a say in our domestic security affairs. You know what I say to that? Let them. Let them require visas.
It’s a brash statement to make, then again, I don’t expect them to actually go through with the threats. The free flow of trade to both our economies is too important. But I do find this kind of armtwisting arrogant. There’s already a high level of intelligence sharing between the two nations. Discussions to heighten that is one thing, but to threaten us if we don’t comply?
I thought the passport-free entrance was a symbol of American-Canadian unity, of our shared values and a testament to our communal border security. We’ve progressed back to passport-only entry, and now we’re being pushed to visa-only entry.
It is the arrogance that fuels these threats which bothers me. America has a bad wrap here. It doesn’t help that they already have stations in all of our international airport. Or that they built a concrete barrier in the middle of my downtown’s busiest laneways, in the name of protecting their embassy. From bombs. As if somehow the existing bomb-proof glass, seperator, fifteen foot high fence, second seperator, and line of impact poles didn’t do the job already.
Why the Americans felt the need to build that military-grade fortress in the downtown core of my city I know not. But if their way to keep pushing policies through remains through pure bullying, and not even-handed negotiations, then they’re only going to continue to isolate themselves further.
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