Call the cops on your neighbor, get a cookie

Try as I might, I can't keep myself from posting delicious nuggets from Bruce Schneier's blog. If your not reading it every day you should be ashamed of yourselves.
This current one is about the war on the unexpected. How citizens are encouraged to report everything that they see that doesn't seem right to them.
In this day and age, that basically means everything.
You really need to read this article. It is very insightful, and it gives further proof that society as we know it is going to hell. The terrorists have won. Shit, they don't even need to kill another person ever. We are already terrorized by our petty fear. Terrorists don't need to blow up planes to shut down airports. Just call in an anonymous tip, and you'll terrorize the travellers and authorities for hours or even days.
This has got to stop!
People, refuse to be terrorized! Refuse to believe that everything outside your own kitchen is out to hurt you. The world isn't as bad a place as people make it out to be.
Sure, people are assholes, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are out to destroy civilization as we know it.
A bright example of this fear mongering (that was also linked from Bruce's article) is this campaign that you're supposed to call the cops whenever you see a parent holding a child's hand. Does holding your child's hand automatically mean that you're sexually abusing it? I'm going to go for "no" on that question, but if the societal tendencies today are to be believed, the answer to that question is "yes".
I used to think that people's stupidity was what would bring about the downfall of society, but I was wrong. It's people's unfounded fear that will ultimately cause the world to collapse.

Maybe if people weren't so dumb, they wouldn't believe in all this crap that the media machine churns out.

Movie Plot Terrorist Threats

Normally I try not to report stuff that Bruce Schneier writes in his blog, since I link to the blog here on the right, but for those of you who don't read it, I felt like I just had to tell you about this.
Bruce held a competition, petitioning his readers.

Your goal: invent a terrorist plot to hijack or blow up an airplane with a commonly carried item as a key component. The component should be so critical to the plot that the TSA will have no choice but to ban the item once the plot is uncovered. I want to see a plot horrific and ridiculous, but just plausible enough to take seriously.

Make the TSA ban wristwatches. Or laptop computers. Or polyester. Or zippers over three inches long. You get the idea.

Your entry will be judged on the common item that the TSA has no choice but to ban, as well as the cleverness of the plot. It has to be realistic; no science fiction, please. And the write-up is critical; last year the best entries were the most entertaining to read.

He got massive responses, and in the end he picked three finalists. They are all incredibly good reads, but the winner, as published in this blog post, is the best by far. Completely credible, and quite doable. You just have to read it. If nothing else, read the last couple of paragraphs to see what the TSA would have to bad, absolutely incredible.
I wanted to blog about this when I first read it, but I constrained myself. Now that Slate put up a piece on it, I could no longer keep my peace.

On A Roll

I've been feeling a bit under the weather this last week. The phrase "my old bones ache" (from Warcraft III, actually. Spoken by Cairn Bloodhoof) really fit me yesterday and the day before. Today the aching is gone, but now my throat hurts instead.
My roommate gave me throat pills with Lidocain in them, which do a pretty good job of easing the pain. I'm going to the store for some more of the same in the morning. Might be good to have. They contained a shitload of Lidocain too, I can barely feel my tongue, hehe.

Anyway, what I was getting at was the fact that I haven't had the energy to blog properly this week, and I first thought that I'd submit a series of small blog posts, but then I thought what the hell, and put them all in one big one. Thus:

This week was spent in London, as some of you might know. Not actually IN London I guess, but more just west of London in a little shit hole called Reading. (All British towns are shit holes, no offense.) I went to visit a dear old friend of mine. We partied hard, like we always do, and I had a blast! I guess I did come home with some sort of fever, but I suppose that's the price you pay for going all out. I met a lot of cool new people there. Some of which were from South Africa, which is pretty neat. What they were doing in the UK though, I will never know.
I also met this really cute girl. At first I thought "But, she's cute... There are no cute girls in England.", but then my friend explained that she wasn't from England, and that's when all the pieces fell in to place. It's too bad that we live in different parts of the world though. Travel is fairly cheap I guess, but not that cheap. It's not like jumping on your bike and riding for 10 minutes.

Speaking of travel, my friend told me that I might have to watch what I bring with me on the plane, what with the recent ban of liquids on board and all that nonsense. They actually did force us to put stuff in transparent bags at Schipol, to carry through the security check, but at least we were allowed to put those things back in our bags after security.
I wonder what the point of that exercise is. Do they think that the security people could have spotted "dangerous" liquids just by looking at them? I'll bet you a small country to a bent hair pin that no one that works security at an airport can tell if one water like substance or another can be used to make explosives. "But they put it through machines" you say, "maybe the machines know?". Well, if the machines know, then why can't we just keep the containers loose in our bags? Why do they need to be packed in sealed transparent bags?
A false sense of security, and a shitload of inconvenience is all it is. I don't even feel safer, not one bit.
Ohh, and when I'm going through security in Gatwick, I start noticing that our queue is much slower than the others. I look ahead, and find that we have to take out fucking shoes off and put them through the x-ray machine too!
Can you believe this bullshit? What's next? walking naked through the metal detector? Putting humans through the x-ray? When does it stop? When will the people of the world rise up as one and say "No more of this bullshit!"?
Don't you see that the terrorists have already won? Being a terrorist, by definition, means that you are someone bent on creating terror. Creating terror doesn't necessarily mean crashing airplanes into skyscrapers. Creating terror means to instill a feeling of terror in other people (or animals, for that matter). To make others afraid.
I think they've done a pretty good job at it so far. We're so scared that we'll allow virtually any freedom reducing "security" measure to feel a little bit safer, yet we're not safer off now than we were before 9/11!
All these so called security measures didn't stop people from bringing liquid explosives on airplanes, and it's sure as hell not going to stop nefarious people doing whatever their doing next, because they know our every move! They know our full strategy! They have our game plan laid out for them to poke holes in!
As you might have gathered from this (and previous posts), I'm a privacy/freedom nut. I also happen to be a security nut, but one thing I'm not is a sheep. They are slowly but surely eroding our freedoms until there is nothing left.
I guess we're lucky that they still let people ride the subway, after what happened in London.
Nuts I tell you, NUTS!

I could rave about this all day, but I'm getting hungry. Time for some microwavable food, because I've spent all my energy writing this piece here, plus I'm sick, so I've earned an easy street dinner.

Watch this space!