Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

The last week or two I’ve had a relative flood of trackback spam left on my blog. They usually pretend to be from a website about a Saskatchewan topic, and copy some or all of my original content to make up theirs. I have to remove from 1 to 10 a day, which is pretty annoying considering it should be an easy thing for Spam Karma 2 to filter out. In past months I tend to get at most 3 a week that make it through as false-negative-detection comments.

Another trick I stumbled across by accident. I tend to leave a lot of tabs open, dealing with the content later when I have more time. One tab turned into a spam webpage when I re-loaded it. Curious what had happened to the original page, I opened my bookmarks (I’d bookmarked my set of tabs last week in Firefox), and traced it to a list of “truisms” about how men and women interact. It looks like the site was set up to get promoted on social media sites like Digg, and once it had attained a lot of PageRank clout in Google, it was flipped to a list of links to offensive automobile ads.

The Wingnutterer also lead me over to BA, where the blogger there was threatened with death in an extortion spam scam. That “killer spam” is not to be taken seriously, although you can send it on to Phonebusters if you live in Canada, or the widely-not-very-respected DHS NIPC. Neither organization will dispatch an officer to the far corner of the earth with the illegal and offensive spam (Are there any other kinds?) came from, in order to deliver a boot to the head.

I’m thinking you could test these nails [on sale on eBay in February] for Jesus’ DNA. Super cool. They are allegedly the nails that crucified the lord.

I love the questions, which are often the best part of a joke eBay auction.

“Q : Je serais intéressé par un lot de 10. Est-ce possible? 22-Fév-08
A : I have only 3.”

Someone wants a lot of 10? Dude, Jesus only had 3 nails put into him, wouldn’t a lot of 10 be admitting to at least 7 fake nails?

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Hat tip A Limerick Ox

The Conservative Party’s website has long been a source of amusement for me. If it wasn’t their phony secure donation page, or their psychedelic platform photo page, or their “2008″ banner above STEPHEN HARPER, it’s their inexplicably bad CPC Energy graphics. It now ranges from an apparent pothead, to a dog that poops energy, to a graphic found on a porn site.

And they’ve been nailed by Warner Music for using a copyrighted song in a public setting.

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Hat tip to ALO

No doubt you’ll find yourself nodding in agreement with the analysis here, regarding the growing economic crisis in the United States. The depth of it hasn’t sunk in for many Americans, and Ron Paul is going to look like a frigging genius in only a few years time (to those who remember him by that point, anyway).

It was believed that the US could afford both a massive military establishment and a high standard of living, and that it needed both to maintain full employment. But it did not work out that way. By the 1960s it was becoming apparent that turning over the nation’s largest manufacturing enterprises to the Department of Defense and producing goods without any investment or consumption value was starting to crowd out civilian economic activities.

[...]
By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the US possessed some 32,500 deliverable atomic and hydrogen bombs, none of which, thankfully, was ever used.

The important questions to ask are:
1. Did the USA survive being attacked because they possessed tens of thousands of nuclear bombs, and methods to deliver them within hours?
2. If the USA could have survived with only 500 nuclear bombs, what would the money, that went into making the other 32,000, have gone into instead?

And now we should ask, what in tarnation do we do with thousands of dangerous bombs that we are terrified of, and will be royally fubarred if only one gets out into the wrong terrorist hands?

“The fact that we did not modernise or replace our capital assets is one of the main reasons why, by the turn of the 21st century, our manufacturing base had all but evaporated.”

Hey, labour-buddy Buzz Hargrove, why don’t you tell GM, Ford, and Chrysler to modernize their capital assets, and introduce inter-changeable parts (like the industrial revolution intended!)? It’s pretty hard to blame the military for keeping your business model in the 20th century. Oh, hang on a second, who makes the Military’s Humvee?

Continue Reading »

Here’s an extremely useful/funny form for people who get into a bind and want to get out the honourable way.

I would caution you against filling out the optional Excuses section. That area is for administrative use only.

“The Golden Compass” [7/10] was a pretty good movie, and if you like ones with fantasy it’s probably great. That reminds me, I still haven’t seen the last of the Lord of the Rings movies. There will be plenty of time while waiting for a follow-up to the Golden Compass.

I thought it was a bit nippy when we came out of the theatre. -39 wind chill can do that you know. At least we didn’t have a flat tire like the poor soul parked across from us.

Who else is pumped for the lunar eclipse Wednesday (today) at about 9:00-10:00 PM CST? (UPDATE: It’s going on starting at 8? My source was WRONG, terribly sorry if anyone missed a part they wanted to see.)

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Did you know Bob Rae had a blog? I didn’t until someone from there visited mine off the Liblogs roll probably. I wonder if other former NDP premiers are going to get blogs. Roy, Lorne, where are yours? If Small Dead Animals blog doesn’t speak for the people of Sask, maybe Old Political Hasbeens can!

I got a high five from an old green bus :-)

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I got added to a blogroll by this fellow partaking in Jon Swift’s Blogroll Amnesty Day, but I’m reluctant to link back in my blogroll because I don’t anticipate making regular visits. As a compromise to participating in their liberal linking policy, I’m linking from this post so you can enjoy the view from another corner [and a different political bend] of North America.

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I got to see a few planes making use of the downtown Toronto airport last month. Porter is a new airline operating out of there, and I’d not heard of them before my cousin mentioned their name to me. I then saw their booth in Union Station.

The corner of the blogosphere that questions power is still seething from seeing two of the most reviled figures in the Conservative “yes-man online power structure” (YMOPS) obtain dead-tree page space in a National paper.

The National Post could be taken seriously if they offered Pale their pages. Instead, I may as well discount the “National Pap” among the YMOPS.

Cause…..If one looks back into history. We really haven’t got a Government right now. We have a corporation.

I wasn’t sure how Pale would react to me registering to comment there (recently they’re among the crowd putting the boots to me), so I figured I had to write this here to let them know what a great article that is.

I guess times are bad in Canada. I’m doing fine, but I’m the exception, and we’ll all be joining the rule at some point in the next 20 years or so. I’m not among the Canadian elite who figure $5B is enough to cure child poverty in ~5 years. (From Question Period on CTV) What, do the Liberals know how to build an “everything’s ok gun” for $5B? Odds are the use of it would be prohibited thanks to previous laws anyway. I’m also not so drunk on Conservative Koolaid to buy Prentice’s ludicrous claim that the Child Tax Benefit of $1200 TAXABLE dollars was the Conservatives’ major push to tackle child poverty.

Most Canadians are not happy with Harper, but he’s not got a lot of big name competition at the moment. The Canadians who are happy with Harper, such as Kate McMillan, well she doesn’t think times are bad enough in Canada for enough people to come over to being interested in politics (and Harper’s brand in particular). We’d need some kind of disaster (famine) before Canadians will really want to support Harper conservatism. Odd; I have entertained the same morbid possibility of an oil/food crisis being a boost for the Green Party (which is an unacceptably partisan thought, but one I had anyway).

I’d have to agree with both Pale and Kate that Canada isn’t living up to its potential. We’re a country in decline. Our military isn’t large enough to do the things we expect from it. Our infrastructure isn’t new enough, or green enough to take us into the next decade, let alone the next century. Our schools can’t be closed fast enough to funnel our children across as few teachers as possible to [supposedly] save a buck. We can’t dig into the ground fast enough to
extract a limited polluting resource that is running out (and is thus destined to become even more valuable if we hang onto it for longer).

Unfortunately, Harper is not going to lead us anywhere because he’s not a person with any leadership vision. That’s the utter irony of the “Stephane Dion is not a leader” attack ad campaign. Harper is a terrible leader, he’s a control freak for sure, and an ego maniac who can’t delegate. He intends to hitch Canada’s wagon to the [failing] American white picket fence dream, instead of making it possible for Canadians to carve out our own destiny in the world.

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(famine of ideas: http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=306732&p=1 )
Kinsella’s blog has been almost interesting the last couple of weeks.

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Iran, as you probably haven’t seen it before.

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We need someone with guts in charge of the country. Someone like this guy who interviewed John Lennon. I look forward to seeing, “I Met the Walrus,” one day.