On my mind is my move to Edmonton with Heidi, my family and my father’s deteriorating health. I wonder whether or not I’m going to be happy as an engineer and where I wish to travel. I am starting to think American authorities are absolutely ridiculous in its handling of this recent “terrorist” attack. I think terrorists have essentially won…by facilitating the crippling of our economies and civil rights.

I saw Avatar, and enjoyed the theme of the story, but I’ll let PZ Myers speak of what annoyed me, the predictability and dullness of the plot:

There are good guys and bad guys, and the good guys are really, really good, and the bad guys are really, really bad. Like straight from the associate of arts degree program at the local Cartoon Villain College. When there’s nothing else to do, they blow things up that gain them nothing but universal loathing. They also have standard cartoon villain military tactics, which usually involves sending in swarms of moronic foot soldiers to accompany their high-tech airborne missile platforms and act as targets for the defenders.

That, and making scientists look like social incompetents.

Today was one of my last days of hanging out with my little brother. I’m incredibly glad I signed up for Big Brothers, Big Sisters. There’s no tax deduction, but I think it’s the furthest you can take a donation…one of your personal time.

I get frustrated at the Olympics, I think it’s a waste of money. So do people who believe that climate change is some hoax, and that pharmaceutical companies are injecting nanochips in my blood via the H1N1 vaccine. The latter two I would love to slap across the head very hard.

Now I’m questionning my job as an engineer…building refineries in Northern Alberta…all for the glory that is ca$h.

Be safe tonight, kids. Happy new year!

I was always told by my father and CNN that Israel always has to defend itself against people who just hated them for no reason. When 9/11 happened, I was pretty sure I was still going to join the Air Force. I got my glider pilot’s license the next summer, and my private pilot’s license the summer before 12th grade. I was not uncommon for my father to have a military themed wallpaper on his office desktop background.

This is a tomahawk cruise missile warhead delivery system being launched from a naval vessel. It can deliver over 1,000 lbs of explosive over 2,500 kilometers. I’d see things like this on Extreme Machines and love it. I can just picture the narrator saying something along the lines of “With technology like this, the bad guy doesn’t even have a chance to fire a single bullet.”.

—

Nowaways, my perspective is a little different. I see Israel as a bully, I question our involvement in Afghanistan, supporting a false government, when only about 100 taliban are actually in the country (they’re all in Pakistan now). I can understand if we’re making money off of their drugs, which is what it seems. Funny they don’t tell you that Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, is the brother of a major drug lord. It’s also funny that the Allies only burn southern opium crops, not northern ones.

I see this senseless violence, and greed that is to a level no different than telecommunications companies screwing over the public, or ticketmaster charging you $25 in “convenience fees” per event ticket, and wonder where we’ve gone wrong. We’re all just greedy motherfuckers, it seems.

Now when I look at a photo of a tomahawk cruise missile, I see the real result:

This child was at a distance from the target. I think its safe to guess that whoever was in the blast radius could now only be poured into a vial. This shit happens nearly daily in Iraq. How about if one cruise missile were to hit a rural community in Pennsylvania?  It would be a massive tragedy. Hit a few brown people in the desert? Meh.

Let’s pretend that is a photo of a child in Canada who died at the hands of, say, the Chinese. Would they be winning our hearts & minds, or would we sign up to kill those invaders at any cost?

My point? I do not believe that our tactics are helping us at all in reducing the threat of terrorism.

Amy Goodman is a well-known reporter in alternative news. A shit-disturber, so to speak. Regardless, she was going to Vancouver to give a talk about healthcare, and Canadian border guards clearly mistreated her on the grounds that she was possibly speaking against the olympics.

I don’t care if you’re pro or against the olympics; this is fucking disgusting.

Some of you may have noticed a new search engine called “Bing”. It’s Microsoft’s counter to Google (B.I.N.G. = But Its Not Google). If you shop online ussing Bing, you get a 2% to 10% Cashback on any item you see with your search. A writer at Bountii.com posted about a discrepancy. If you search for an item in Bing, it inserts a cookie in your browser. So if you search for, say, a camcorder, you will see a listed price of $758 at “Store X” minus 2% = $742.84. A $15.16 savings, right? Not really.

If you either delete that cookie, or open a different browser (say, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Internet Explorer), and search for the same item on “Store X”.com, it will be listed at $699. Huh? Yeah, That Bing cookie just tricked you into thinking you were saving cash when they were really jipping you.

Microsoft sent in a defense, but I still think they are complete goons.

—

Next up is the Amazon Kindle. Not many people I know seem to be aware of it, but I’ll let you in on a secret: You don’t actually own the books you pay for. Amazon just sells you a license to read it, that they can revoke at any moment. It’s basically renting out books. Don’t believe me? Ask the hundreds who found that Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm were deleted from their own damned Kindles. Oh, the irony.

That’s right, Amazon deleted books from people who thought they bought the book.

Remember, every time you see an advertisement, hear of a sale or an offer: they’re just saying whatever the fuck it takes for you to give them your money. They’ll make you think you need their shit so bad that your head will explode, if it means you’ll give them your money.

Nobody goes into business to give people great value.

Thousands of kilometers from here, a nation will be hosting an international gathering, where many important officials will attend. There will be protesters, supporters, riot police, the usual.

But here’s where it gets gross, if tentative laws pass, protesters will ultimately be denied free speech: If they have a sign protesting the even on their own property, they can be fined—even sent to jail.

Authorities are planning to forcibly remove the homeless. They have destroyed over 1000 low income homes. Laws are on the block to make leaflets in protest illegal.

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Sounds like yout typical protest in China, eh? A WTO meeting? Say what I wrote was completely true, and is about to happen, where the Hell would it be?

Take a guess and check below the fold.

How about the Vancouver Olympics?

How about Canada conducting the frickin’ disgusting acts that we oh-so-frown upon in order to be pretty for two weeks? This is fucking bullshit.

Couldn’t get the weekend off at the job
Have to work extra hard on the report, and not sob

Let’s hope my sanity stays

–

Cell phone battery died.

Charger won’t work
“It’s actually your phone that’s broken” said the clerk

“You need to buy a new one, the warranty is out.”
“Until then, communication you will be without”

I nearly cried.

For I have no such money to spend
I need to pay rent

–

Indeed, these are times of stress
But of it I can only make the best

Later today; an important test
God, I need rest

File this in the “Monday” compartment

But now the shit’s really going to hit the fan: Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize. I don’t think it’s an appropriate time to give the award, but the commitee made no secret of the fact that they’re aware of his lack of time in office.

I hope hardline Republicans are shitting their pants. I’d love to see the froth on the side of their mouths, spewing in senseless anger. Someone should just remind them that God is responsible for everything, and that he works in mysterious ways, haha.

—

Oklahoma passed a law forcing details of any abortion to be posted publicly, including age, race, marital status, county in which it was performed. I cannot think of a more disgusting law. I’d expect this from a crazy theocracy, not the US. Oh wait, some states are crazy theocracies. I pity what I would guess to be one of very few black women in Guymon, Oklahoma who needed an abortion. The whole town would know.

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We live in a time of great scientific advance, knowledge and understanding. (Here are three random articles I plucked out in less thanh a minute). But then you have lying, war-mongering, ignorant and very scared God-lovers that are just fucking ruining it for the whole godamned planet. Take these two Republican congressman who say the US should attack Iran first, not Israel. How about realizing that only 1.7% of Americans are Jewish? Nobody seems to care about the 15% that are non-religious…

Haven’t they learn that every single time they have meddled in the affairs of other countries, it has had negative consequences? Israel has nukes, and they’ve proven that they’re very willing to defy every Geneva Convention, every bit of morality, to wage war against Muslims. I understand Iran’s intentions of wanting to defend itself against Israel, although I don’t think anyone should have nukes. Have you noticed that the US is aiding a country that is lining up for a trial at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity? May we consider, for a moment that US foreign policy has made it “The bad guy”?

Healthcare is but a blip amongst the problems in the US. The economy, and its wars are far more important. But there is such internal struggle between an emotional and ignorant portion of the country and the rest, that even something as blatantly obvious, needed and cost-effective public health care can’t even get through Congress. Fuck me, our Southern neighbours are in a heap of trouble when China comes collecting its debts.

I try to be optimistic when I meet new people like my couchsurfers, when I read about new scientific advance and how we’re discovering new ways of harnessing renewable energy. But it’s things like these that make me very pessimistic indeed.

The UK Border Agency has scientists “horrified” at a weird, eugenics-flavoured proposal to test asylum seekers’ DNA to determine if they are truly and purely of the “race” they claim to be from. Even the scientists who pioneered DNA fingerprinting and related techniques call the idea “horrifying,” “naive” and “flawed.”

Science has obtained Border Agency documents showing that isotope analyses of hair and nail samples will also be conducted “to help identify a person’s true country of origin.” The project “is regrettable,” says Caroline Slocock, chief executive of Refugee and Migrant Justice headquartered in London. Although asylum-seekers are asked to provide tissue samples voluntarily, turning down a government request for tissue could be misinterpreted, she says, “so we believe [the program] should not be introduced at all.”

The Border Agency’s DNA-testing plans would use mouth swabs for mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome testing, as well as analyses of subtle genetic variations called single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). One goal of the project is to determine whether asylum-seekers claiming to be from Somalia and fleeing persecution are actually from another African country such as Kenya. If successful, the Border Agency suggests its pilot project could be extended to confirming other nationalities. Yet scientists say the Border Agency’s goals confuse ancestry or ethnicity with nationality. David Balding, a population geneticist at Imperial College London, notes that “genes don’t respect national borders, as many legitimate citizens are migrants or direct descendants of migrants, and many national borders split ethnic groups.”

Scientists Decry “Flawed” and “Horrifying” Nationality Tests

But wait, there’s more!

Christopher Phillips, University of Santiago de Compostela: I had been asked earlier this year by colleagues in the UKFSS about the prospects of differentiating Somali ancestries from other populations in E[ast] Africa, however, I am sceptical about the precision possible beyond a simple five global group differentiation from limited typing of Y-chromosome/mtDNA/small-scale multiplexes of autosomal SNPs. Clearly there is a serious risk of falling into the trap of over-interpretation of population variation data that has limited scope. My suggestion this spring was to perform whole genome scans to isolate informative markers and begin to build these into sets of SNPs that could then be assessed with comprehensive reference populations. However, this does not amount to consultation on the correct way to develop and test a custom ancestry analysis system. I also doubt that my suggested approach to validating the system will be pursued, since a large number of samples would be required both within the relatively large region of Somalia and from surrounding populations such as those of Ethiopia, Sudan and Eritrea. Therefore a good deal of time, money and patience would be needed to find the best markers for the purpose and then test their efficacy….Jane Evans, NERC Isotope Geosciences Laboratory: I can’t imagine how you use [isotope evidence] to define nationality….It worries me as a scientist that actual peoples’ lives are being influenced based on these methods.

U.K. Border Agency Docs and Expanded Reactions

Her head is bigger than her pelvis. Finally, a real model I can get my girlfriend to aspire to.