It's been a while since I had a chance to sit down and rant about anything in the news.  I've been a touch busy, what with the economy imploding, trying to keep my day job, and working in another country for a couple months.  But enough about me and my hiatus.  On to more important things.
 
Here's one I just read about today: "Prison Officer Sacked After Befriending Inmates on Facebook."
 
My friends and coworkers have commented to me that I rarely have anything good to say about anything, and that assessment is pretty accurate.  I usually say to them that I used to be an optimist, but then I started paying attention.  In this case, though, I actually have something positive to say.  My simultaneous first thoughts when I read the above headline were "GOOD!" and "Wait just a fucking minute...they get Facebook in prison?" 
Not that I give the tiniest of shits about Facebook personally, but I can't even get there from work, nor can I check my gmail account or view most message boards and forums.  Why the hell do convicted criminals have access to the Internet?

It is not without some degree of regret that I must announce that our Anonybrowse proxy service has been disabled.  Apparently I didn't read my hosting providers TOS closely enough, as they clearly state that proxies are a no-no.  For those who are interested, Anonybrowse was just a slightly modified version of Glype, which is, as described on their website at the time of this writing - "a free-to-use, web-based proxy script written in PHP."  For more information on Glype, see www.glype.com.  For other proxy services to help you look at porn and check Facebook from work, see www.google.com.

What little faith I have left in humanity is waning fast.  The yearly consume-a-thon ominously called "Black Friday" has come and gone, this year with at least one directly related fatality.   A 34 year old worker at a Wal-Mart store in Long Island was trampled to death when the group of shoppers gathered outside burst through the doors as the store opened.  One account I read stated that "A metal portion of the door was crumpled like an accordion." 
Folks, I know times are tough and money is tight but a man was killed so you could save some money on a fucking plasma TV or whatever other bullshit widget you absolutely needed to have.  Words fail to express how profoundly grotesque this behaviour is.
I used to think that the blame rested solely on corporate marketing and the news media for convincing the masses to consume beyond their means.  I used to blame television networks for running ads trying to whip consumers into such a frenzy in the days leading up to the sales.  Now I'm not so sure.  Yes, the Media is partially to blame for this situation but I've begun to think that there is a fundamental problem with peoples morality and system of values.  I recognize that everybody loves getting a good deal on something, and paying the least amount of money possible is fiscally responsible behaviour especially given the present economic climate.  The problem is the lengths people are willing to go to in order to get said bargain.  Common sense would dictate that the line be drawn far before killing a person.
Obviously no one intended to kill this man; it was an accident.  The problem now is to get people to learn from this tragedy and think about their actions.  Mob mentality is a dangerous phenomenon capable of making otherwise intelligent people do very stupid things.  People need to recognize this and not go all bat-shit insane every time there's a big sale on at the local Sprawl-Mart.

Arse-puckering news out of the U.K. recently. Noteworthy articles can be found (here) and (here). In a nutshell, there are plans in the works to allow government and law enforcement entities to collect, catalog, and monitor personal information from various internet services including instant messaging, gaming, and social networking sites. It should come as no surprise that the idea of someone looking over their shoulder the whole time they're online pisses a lot of people off, but this isn't the only reason to worry about this kind of surveillance.

Now I'm not saying that it's not important, but I'm going to try to sidestep the whole George Orwell/1984/Big Brother side of the discussion. Issues of privacy as a fundamental right are absolutely important, but the first thing anyone ever points out is that this kind on monitoring of the public is a slippery slope into an Orwellian dystopia. So for shits and giggles (and a brief thought experiment) let's assume that your government loves you, terrorists really are using Facebook to plot global annihilation, and this proposed project has nothing to do with targeting legitimate political dissent and freedom of speech. Warm and fuzzy? Off we go...

I recently saw an article on time.com asking a question that struck me as somewhat bizarre; "Is Cheaper Oil A Good Thing?" "Cheaper Oil"? Cheaper how? Define your terms. Sure, a litre (welcome to Canada) of gas costs less than it did last week, but does John Q actually perceive this slight drop in price as "cheap"? Apparently so. The opiated public has become so conditioned to rapid, seemingly arbitrary fluctuations in prices at the pump that they lose sight of the fact that it's been two-steps-forward-one-step-back for a very long time now.

I took this picture in June of 2003. I found the numerological irony in the price that day amusing because at the time $0.666 per litre was high. It would be about two years later that gas stations would start changing out their signs to be able to display an extra digit and shift the decimal point to the left, forshadowing the price increase above $1.00 per litre.
So the price has more than doubled in less than five years. So what? Well, how many people do you know whose income matches that increase? I'll assume "not many" and continue.