My blog has moved to http://mark.jeftovic.net, all the new stuff has been posted there.

I've had the idea to do some tinkering with powerdns' pipe backend for awhile and had decided to rig up a quick and dirty MD5 encoder/decoder database on a domain I've had for awhile MD5.ORG

So it was pretty easy. Now anybody can quickly get an MD5 hash on any string that'll fit inside a DNS query packet by doing something like:

host -t txt <string>.to.md5.org


or the slightly less readable

dig -t txt <string>.to.md5.org


Then for completeness you can try and see if we already know what string creates a given MD5 hash and retrieve it using

host -t txt <md5hash>.from.md5.org


There is not a lot of practical value to this, it was just a neat hack to learn the basics of the pdns pipe backend, which I like a lot.

I decided to attend the Mesh web 2.0 conference since it was taking place within walking distance of my place. I had better blog that now, since I brazenly left my laptop at home when I went (convention faux pas).

The question that I always have is what the hell is web 2.0 anyway? And how is it different from web 1.0?

There was a predictable mutual admiration club forming over blogs, tagging, social networking, RSS and communities. "100% authenticity" was being bandied about in a lot of overheard conversations.

Now that "web 2.0" is heating up as defined by a series of high profile aquisitions, it seems to me like web2.0 is really just "bubble v2". Another wave of start-ups whose business plan revolves around "social networks", "community driven", "100% authenticity"..."and then we get bought by Google or Yahoo". Sound familiar?

The "Does Web2.0 Need VC" panel with Rick Segal the celebrity blogstar VC from JLA Ventures and Jason Fried, of 37signals.com, the non-VC funded, profitable company from Chicago, was refreshing.

It was refreshing because both Jason and Rick recognized that profits and revenues count for something, and Rick's "Don't take VC if you don't need the money" was advice well received. Rick Segal, BTW, is one of the "good-guy" VC's in this world, and I've always had a very high opinion of JLA Ventures. I've also bought Jason Fried's Getting Real because I was impressed with what he had to say (don't take VC if you can help it, in today's market its more than doable to bootstrap your business, charge for your products/services, and you don't have to move to the Valley to be in the tech biz)

I remember the startup.com movie, where the guys were so smug and proud of their first round financing I remarked to my girlfriend (who is now my wife), "I think these guys have their first round financing confused with revenues."

Now that the whatever 2.0 bubble is in full force, there is a little bit of that circulating still and I am always grateful when a panel throws some cold water it.

I remember during tech-wreck 1.0, when companies were failing left, right and center, VC was drying up and shareholder value was evapourating by the billions, I got an email from somebody at RobTV asking me if I would be interested in appearing on a forthcoming "venture capital" episode, where I would have the opportunity to pitch the members of their VC panel to invest in easyDNS

I replied back with a different idea. How about instead of the same old "grovel for the VCs" I bring along 4 years of company financial statements demonstrating growing revenues and profits and the VCs can pitch me on why we should take their money and let them get their mitts into our profitable company?

I never heard back from them.

A couple years ago I subscribed to Kirt Christensen's "Buying Web Businesses" for about a month. I didn't renew my subscription and haven't given it much more thought, until today.

Today I got a porn spam in my inbox from "gspotnews.com". I recognized the email address I received this to as the one-time address I used when I subcribed to Kirt Christensen's website. I took a look at the fine print at the bottom of the email and saw this:

You are receiving this Monthly Newsletter because you provided us permission
by agreeing to our privacy policy when you signed up for an Internet service/product thatis billed by our company.
If you feel that you are receiving this email in error,or wish to no longer receive this newsletter in the future, please click here to unsubscribe the following address: DELETED@DELETED. Please allow 48 hours for the unsubscribe to be processed. Thank you!

Ibill is an internet credit card processing company. It looks like they have decided that it is ok to send porn spam to their customers' customers.

This goes off the charts in terms of of sleaziness. I emailed Kirt Christensen that his credit card processor is spamming his customers, we'll see if he cares.

In the meantime, a quick check of the mailer logs on easydns revealed a few hundred gspotnews spams going to other easydns members, so now my customers are also receiving this garbage, probably because in the past they also paid for services online to a website using ibill to clear transactions.

So gspotnews.com and ibill.com are now banned from our mail forwarders. Thanks for being on our show.

Today, for the second time my bookkeeper put something on my desk that gave me pause. She is usually pretty good at weeding out ads and solicitations and filing them into the paper shredder, but a couple weeks ago, and again today she put a plain white envelope on my desk, my name and address had been typed off of what appeared to be a typewriter. No return address.

Inside is what at first glance appears to be a single page, ripped out of a magazine, with an article about executive planning or in today's case, public speaking.

An ordinary post-it note is affixed in the upper right corner:


Mark, Try this.
It works!

-J


The first time this happened, I was perplexed. What is this and where did it come from? The original article was about how busy execs can balance career and family and as a new dad, this appealed to me. How considerate my anonymous friend was!

Who to thank? I emailed to the two people I know who's first initial is "J" asking them if they took the trouble to cut an article out of a magazine and postal mail it to me.

They both promptly emailed back, making the same wisecracks about "early onset Alzheimers" but to their knowledge. neither of them knew what the hell I was talking about.

So I looked closer, going so far as to pull an old file out of the cabinet and comparing the handwriting on the post-it to that of a former colleague here who's name also begins with "J". No match.

Back to the article, finally I see it, the word "advertisement" captioned at the top of the article. The coupon for "Executive Focus" that just happened to be on the back page was not so co-incidental. The copyright notice was "© 2006 Personalized Promotion by Briefings Publishing Group".

This was an elaborate ruse.

At first I was impressed. This marketing effort not only had me seriously considering subscribing to their magazine (because as a new dad, I am very much interested in time management and lifestyle balance issues) but even had me email two friends talking about it!

That seemed impressive until it dawned on me that the "success" of the campaign rested on the fact that I had been deceived. Fooled into believing somebody who knew me personally took the trouble to mail me this "article" (hindsight: most of my friends would just shoot me the URL via IM or email, come to think of it, the only person who postal mails me hard copy are the newspaper clippings my mother sends me), they hoped to trick me into subscribing to their product.

In short, the whole thing was a clever, unique con job. Not a good way to try to start a business relationship with me.

I haven't blogged for quite some time. The longer I'm away from blogging, the harder it is to get back in because I feel a need to adequately write about all the events that transpired in the interim, those which kept me from writing. It's such a daunting task I put it off until I break down and usually dispense with the entire gap in once sentence:

I'm a daddy, I have baby daughter now.

Enough said.

Now that I'm a parent, I find myself marvelling at the twists and turns my life has taken to get me to this point. The point where I find myself looking into the 7-week old eyes of a newborn infant who flashes that dazzling smile of hers which simply floors me and thinking: there's a little baby soul in there, and that soul needs her daddy, and that's me.

Speaking of life's ironies and twists, I choose today to resume blogging because Bob Rae is expected to announce his candidacy for the federal liberal party. The man led the socialist NDP to a one-term government in Ontario which took the province from a surplus to about a 27 billion dollar deficit in 5 quick years wants to run the surplus running, federal debt-reducing libs. Man that's weird.

The other weird thing is when Rae was premier he wrote a little song called "We're in the Same Boat Now", a joyful ditty about multi-racial harmony, and submitted it to Sony Music for publication and was laughed at publicly.

Always the opportunist, I jumped on the situation and the heavy-metal band I was in at the time, Landslide, recorded a power-punk version of that song and released it to the media for a very fun, albeit short-lived, moment in the sun for our band. (We predictably distingrated shortly after that).

I still have 7" singles of our rendition of Bob Rae's song, and I recently managed to snag the landslide.ca domain name, so I think I will quickly throw a website up there and put the old Rae ditty and the other Landslide tunes up for posterity.

For amusement I have been watching the share price of Google for awhile now. I remember being taken aback at the lunacy of it all when I heard the CNBC cheerleading squad call for $400 back when it was still in the $200 range.

Well, it's been trading above $400 for quite some time now and the other day on a long car drive I did some back-of-napkin calculations to compare what gives you the greatest ROI from Google.

First, some review (at least I hope this is review ;)

The object of investing is what? It is to obtain an adequate return on capital commensurate with the risk.

Why does one buy a stock? Trick question. Most people will say "to sell it a higher price", buy low, sell high, etc. This is why most people buy stocks, and in case you didn't notice, most people lose money in the stockmarket.

You buy a stock to gain ownership in a business, and thus to partake in a portion of its earnings.

Circling back to the top and closing the loop: you make investments in order to generate returns on those investments. Remember that as we work through the following:

Google's Adsense program is truly ubiquitous across the internet. Nearly everybody has those contextual text ads on their websites and they are a true bonanza for content and forum related sites. Some people are making truly stupendous amounts of money monthly from Adsense revenues.

Take a website that earns a steady $25/day in Adsense (I know a modest website that does this much and its far closer to the bottom end of the ladder than the top). That's $750 month, or $9,000 a year in income. Lets figure $100/month for a server and bandwidth, you're looking at net $7,800 annually in free cashflow, paid monthly out of Google and to the website owner.

Now, Google is currently trading at a p/e multiple of about 95 (!). So it's earning about $4.50 share. Divide 4.5 into 7,500 to arrive at the number of shares of Google you would need to own to get the same earnings = 1,666. You would need to own 1,666 shares of Google to derive the same earnings as our hypothetical website earning $25/day via Adsense. 1,666 shares of Google would cost you $713,731 on the open market today.

Which gives you the better ROI? Owning shares in Google or owning a website that earns income via Google Adsense?

Consider that there is a fairly liquid marketplace for revenue generating websites and current valuations are anywhere between 1 to 5 years' revenues. Even at the top valuation, you should be able to buy an established revenue generating website earning $25/day for around $40,000.

I think this may be the internet equivalent of the "inverted yield curve" as we see an alternate method to extract cold hard cash out of a company trading at nearly 3-digit earnings multiple that doesn't even pay dividends.

Ebay made a very smart move recently and removed most of the costs associated with their developer platform. I think this will bring a lot of innovative new services to the market as the barrier to entry is now largely technical and not financial.

One of the reasons Amazon's AWS and affiliate program is so ubiquitous across the net is largely due to two things: 1) the depth and stickiness of the Amazon site and 2) the free access to their affiliate and AWS services.

Ebay has one of the few sites whose depth and prevalence approaches that of Amazon, although a back-of-the-napkin comparison shows Amazon dwarfs Ebay in backlinks by about 28 million to 6 million.

I started playing with PHP's pear class Services_Ebay and after some struggling, I finally have a handle on it and thought I'd post some of the "aha" links which helped get me there.

Programming eBay Web Services with PHP 5 and Services_Ebay covers getting up and running. Here are a couple of handy calls to know:


$session = Services_Ebay::getSession($devId, $appId, $certId);
$session->setToken($token);

$call = Services_Ebay::loadAPICall('GetCategories');
$call->describeCall();
$result = $call->call($session);
print_r($result);


The describeCall() describes any method you care to load via loadAPICall() and you can see the complete list of methods in the package via getAvailableApiCalls()

The describeCall() output links to the eBay Developers documentation on the given call.

For example, getCategories() is documented here, which explains which parameters to pass to obtain the version number of the current category list and what to pass to dump the entire category tree.

One silly problem I ran into wass, how do I pass the parameters to the getCategory() call? It took me awhile because I couldn't find it via googling so I had to experiment.

Turns out it's


$session = Services_Ebay::getSession($devId, $appId, $certId);
$session->setToken($token);
$ebay = new Services_Ebay($session);

try {
$args = array(
'DetailLevel'=>1,
'ViewAllNodes'=>1,
);
$result = $ebay->GetCategories($args);
print_r($result);
} catch (Exception $e) {
echo "Something went wrong.";
echo $e;
}



If you're going to cut your teeth on the getCategories() call like I did, remember to lift the default 8M memory limit on your script when you dump the entire tree.

So I'm looking forward to experimenting with this API.

This post was gelling in my mind prior to yesterday's fall of the Liberal government, but now that every political hack in the vicinity is going to bombard me with lies promises for "change" I'll outline the kind of changes we need to see and why there is no politician equipped to attempt to deliver it.

I'm currently reading two books: Empire of Debt by the Daily Reckoning's Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggins, and The Monetary Elite Vs. Gold's Honest Discipline by Vincent LoCascio, whom in an act of supreme flattery, sent me a copy asking for my thoughts.

The former cautions against the folly of "world improving", proving the old adage of the road to hell and demonstrating how the unbridled fiscal disaster looming in the world today is a direct consequence of a desire to think up what is best for other people, and then setting about to impose those improvements upon a hapless world.

The latter argues for "honest money", describing in excrutiating detail why what we have today is anything but, and why as a result of this, markets are not free the system is not stable and that things we take for granted as "normal", such as inflation and boom-bust business cycles, aren't. They are symptoms of an abberant monetary system.

When I reflect on material such as this I realize that at heart, I'm a free market conservative in a lonely place. It's loney here because what passes for "free markets" in this day and age are really heavily rigged ponzi-schemes based on debt financing, and what passes for "conservatives" are actually magical thinking "New Economy" flakes using pixie dust to cut taxes, goose spending, borrow more money than is made and somehow come out "wealthier" on the other end.

Ideologies are dangerous things, but as a political animal I find myself in abject disagreement with the status quo in the West today, how things are run, what is promoted as "beneficial" and what are true motivations are, that I find myself frequenting the fringes of the political sphere, places where eccentric libertarians hang out and even other places where left leaning collectivists gather to "stick it to the man".

This latter group misunderstands free-market economic conservatism as much as the fake, conservative wannabees do themselves. I'm sure if they understood it, they would embrace it.

Dishonest money booby-traps the system.

Honest money would mitigate what I call "the rampant pursuit of money" (i..e "Rampant Capitalism"). Rampant Capitalism is not greed for greed's sake but it is a horrible, unnatural side-effect of a dishonest monetary system.

Because of inflation, which always recall is neither natural or inevitable, earnings and savings are eroded. It is a form of theft. If you go out and make a million dollars, you can't just take it off the table and retire. Especially if you're reasonably young, say under 50. Odds are you'll outlive your money because it inexorably loses its purchasing power over time, thanks to politicians and bankers who keep devaluing your million dollars by endlessly printing up billions upon billions more and then buying votes with it.

Business owners and entrepreneurs tend to understand this more acutely, and the only "cure" for this is to try to invest any retained earnings or savings into investment vehicles whose rate of return is higher than the inflation rate. This is exacerbated in today's climate where interest rates are held artificially low and the widely reported inflation rates are routinely manipulated to make them more palatable (i.e. reporting them ex-food and ex-energy because nobody eats or heats their home). The result is a treadmill and short sited investment horizons which blur into daytrading and speculation.

Money that would have been well enough left in a savings account somewhere and preserving its buying power for a generation joins a frantic lemming-like rush around the world for returns on investment exceeding the destruction wrought by inflation: carry trades evolve, leverage is sought through margin, complex derivatives arise, it becomes "hot money".

A dumbed-down picture of the cycle, as enabled by dishonest money and world improving looks like this:

1. A politician steps forward to tell us what his vision of what is best for everybody is.
   
2. He makes promises so that if many people back his vision, he will distribute money from the few to the many (this is the only way the economics of vote buying works)
   
3. The politician is elected and he proceeds to improve the edges of the empire
   
4. Money is created to pay for the votes (promises, entitlement programs)
   
5. More money is created to finance the improvement of the world (wars are expensive)
   
6. next electoral cycle starts
   
7. after a few of these, the next boom-bust business cycle starts
   

I think that complaints about "rampant capitalism" and "unbridled market forces" are really complaints about things that impede free markets and if leftists understood that, they'd turn into libertarians overnight.

When collectivist systems fail it usually reveals the folly of central planning and how it is often the most clueless way to try to organize a society.

So the failings in capitalism and socialism turn out to have one common element: a government run by a panel of short-sited monkeys deciding what's best for everybody else.

I think where libertarians differ from leftists is that the former understand that governments are part of the problem, and the solution is a minimal government whose function shouldn't stray too far beyond protecting the rights of the individual, while leftists don't like the governments that routinely get elected and think things will improve drastically if their idea of a big government was able to run the show for awhile.

My personal belief is that it is illogical bordering on delusional to think anybody knows what's best for anybody else. It's hard enough getting through your own life without getting smucked by a car on the way home from work, how are you supposed to know what everybody else is supposed to do?

Get rid of 99% of the government, make money honest, and everybody mind their own business. What could be so hard about that?

I was driving to an appointment last night listening to talk radio and heard whiner after whiner complaining about recent court decision that empowers the operators of the privately owned and operated ETR ( express toll route) to prevent toll route debtors from having their license plates renewed until they pay up.

This is a new turn of events and people who owe the ETR money are plenty steamed about it. Calls were coming in from people who owed upwards of $4,000 and $5,000. They're upset. They assumed they would be able to continue stealing services forever. Now that they've been caught out they're all armchair experts on why the ETR is a bad idea and should never have been allowed to happen in the first place.

Here's a newsflash: if it's a bad idea, if you think privately owned and operated roads are such a bad thing then don't drive on them. Could it be any simpler?

Now here's a few facts of life: oil is getting more expensive, not cheaper. Mark my words, the days of three-digit oil prices aren't far off and when they get here, they'll be here to stay.

The same people today who complain about the end of their ability to steal services from the ETR will be the same people tomorrow complaining about the price of gas when it heads north of $2/litre and more. They will argue for government price caps.

At the same time, these people have lives of their own, they work, they own businesses, and when they start demanding their right to steal services from private property owners or demanding government imposed price caps on gas I will say "why don't we put a goverment imposed cap on your wages too, then?" If they own a candy store, I will start demanding the right to walk in, help myself to the finest chocolate they have, and walk right out.

How will these people justify having other people's property rights stricken down and their own upheld in the same breath?

Toll roads are good and gas prices must rise according to the laws of supply-and-demand. Why? Because that's the natural and fair way to reign in consumption in a future where demand would otherwise outstrip supply.

Environmentalists should be all over privately owned toll roads and market dictated gas prices.

Complainers should go join the communist party, because that's what they're arguing for.

A lot of my blog entries reference Sieg, the Atavist and you may wonder "who is this guy?". He is not a peer, he's from a different generation than I am. More of a mentor, he gave me my first job in computing back in 1993.

His software company was getting near the end of the list in the phone book, and I was cold-calling them all looking for a job (and getting nowhere). He agreed to see me, and had in mind the task of porting his courier company's COBOL applications and data from an old Tandy microcomputer (with 8" floppy drives) to a shiney new 486 running SCO Xenix. Did I know anything about it? Nothing. "Sink or swim" were his parting words to me as he loaded me up with a stack of manuals and sent me on my way.

It was the beginning of a long and fruitful friendship (I hope for both of us). I spent many an afternoon in his office combing through source code, figuring out how stuff was supposed to work and Sieg would teach me about investments, economics and a crazy political theory he subscribed to which turned out to be Libertarianism. It sounded like workable anarchy to me and it made no sense (I was still pretty left-leaning in those days, having been a recent student, and when you're safely nuzzled away in an academic cacoon, you inevitably turn into a raving pinko. I'm probably still further to the left today than most capital L Libertarians if only for the simple fact that I haven't left Canada)



Sieg, pictured above at age four, came to Canada from Germany (as did my own mother), but I didn't know about his early life until I read his blog post about it today. The fact that his family spent their first winter in Canada living in a chicken coop in Alberta is a testament to the principles Sieg embodies: self-reliance and personal responsibility. Something we're woefully short of in today's world full of entitlements and reluctance to accept responsibility for one's own actions.

So quote Sieg:

I have never felt disadvantaged because of the less than perfect circumstances during some parts of my life. I never wanted anyone to feel sorry for me or to help make things better. I learned that from the example of my parents. They just wanted to be left alone to succeed on their own. That is all I have ever wanted. Don't help. Just get the hell out of my way. Don't give me anything, but don't take from me what isn't yours either.

Amen to that.

This is not to say that people shouldn't help each other, and I don't think Sieg means to say that. I know this because several times over my life, he has come to my aid in one manner or another but I think the key point here was that at the time, I asked for his help.

Self reliance doesn't mean nobody co-operates and you let your fellow man starve to death or drown, but it does mean picking up the cards you are dealt and playing them.

Friday night/early saturday AM, around 12:30 EST am I'll be doing a segment about WEHT.net on a special "Where Are They Now?" show on WBZ NewsRadio 1030, which I'm told goes out across 38 states.

Word is that I'll be on after Micky Dolenz and before former Batgirl Yvonne Craig. Kinda cool.

Speaking as a guy who believes it is inherently impossible to predict things like stock market crashes, earthquakes and alien invasions, I'm getting numerous signals today that are food for thought on their own and ominous in aggregate.

On one hand there is Hurricane Katrina which is barrelling down on New Orleans, and if it hits can cause a lot more damage and fallout than we're accustomed to seeing from hurricanes, even bad ones. Apparently there's only been three other CAT5's in history and tonight Stratfor Global Intelligence sent out a breaking news report titled The Geopolitics of Katrina. Stratfor's core business is meticulously researched analysis, they are not in the "breaking news" business. The last time I received a breaking news alert from them was about 10 hours before the Iraq War II started, telling readers that bombers had been spotted departing from bases in Europe.

The economic effects from a full-on Katrina hit on the oil refinaries and ports of Louisiana could be hard hitting. In fact the overnight oil price has already spiked past $70/barrel as I type this (gold is up a couple bucks an ounce in fairly short order as well).

This combined with the fedspeak out of Jackson Hole this weekend make for an interesting couple weeks ahead. The speeches contained a couple of startling nuggets once you remove the circular, double-talk which the Fed carefully crafts to glaze over as many eyes as possible while bluffing at an appearance of transparency. Greenspan pronounced the housing bubble all but "ready-to-pop" in that understated hocus-pocus which is his trademark:

"The housing boom will inevitably simmer down. As part of that process, house turnover will decline from currently historic levels, while some house price increases will slow and prices could even decrease".

Which is nice non-threatening way to state that the housing bubble which has been fueled entirely by reckless credit expansion is about ready to pop.

Govenor Donald Kohn waxed philisophic on the pitfuls of financial derivatives and had this to say:

The risk is that private agents overestimate the ability or willingness of central banks to damp volatility in asset prices or the economy, or that they fail to appreciate that future policy actions depend on an imperfectly predictable economic outlook. But developments should have partially alleviated some of these concerns. Investors have had an opportunity to observe that policy actions in 1987, 1998, and 2001-03 cushioned the economy, but they did not stop major declines in the prices of equity in 1987 and 2001 or of risky credits in 1998. Short-term rates have risen substantially in the past year, reducing the profitability of "carry trades" without triggering an unwinding that drove long-term interest rates higher or widened risk premiums. And expectations that policy tightening would remain gradual over the near-term have not stopped long-term rates from fluctuating substantially in response to incoming data; the movements of future or forward rates out the yield curve after surprises in data have been at least as large since 2003 as they were before.

That is not to say that we have nothing to worry about. As I already noted, Alan Greenspan, himself, has often been concerned about market complacency--as recently as his latest monetary policy testimony. People may well perceive the economy as more stable than it is or central banks with greater power than we have to smooth the economy or to foresee our own actions.

Which, as George Ure notes, sounds like a nice soft way to tell the financial bankers in fedspeak/doublespeak: "If the derivatives blow up, don't assume we (the Central Bank) will be able to fix it".

These long-winded innoccuous sounding pronouncements sound unimportant, barely comprehensible and boring. They are carefully crafted to appear to be just that. They are not. These statements are analyzed six-ways from sunday by hordes of financial analysts and trillions of dollars worth of assets and perhaps more importantly, derivatives of assets, will slosh around the global economy based on their conclusions.

Any one of these factors on their own could make things interesting. All of them coming together in one shot could be pretty wild.

As I watch more of our rights being chisled away, such as random searches on subways in NYC or the impending "Lawful Access" here in Canada, I realize that like it or not, some form of surveillance society is probably inevitable. I also thought this long before 9/11 as this post of mine on the OpenFlows mailing list describes back on Sept/99.

In it I cite Damon Knight's short story I See You which describes a not-so-distant future society where everybody can monitor anything in both time and space. Crime becomes impossible and privacy extinguished. As David Brin once observed, "Everybody wants privacy for themselves and accountability for everybody else".

If we are headed where I think we are headed, I will trade some privacy if I get everybody else's accountability in exchange. That means I will not sit still for a "top down" Big-Brother type surveillance society where politicians and lawmakers confiscate our rights to enforce laws which benefit their backroom deals. But I will settle for a massively parallel "everybody-sees-everything" society or "somebody-sees-everything" society that would sufficiently impair the corrupt from operating at any level of society.

So if a cop wanted to search me as I enter the subway that's fine. I'll scan in his badge number with my PDA and if he finds something on me he doesn't like, then he better not have any unexplained cash deposits into his own or his family's bank accounts and he shouldn't be driving a Ferrari on a beat-cop's salary. My lawyer will be checking out all of his dirty laundry, not to mention the chief of police, the TTC commissioner and whoever passed the goddamn law in the first place.

In a massively parallel surveillance society, you look at mine means I'll look at yours. If the police can call my ISP and get my access logs, I'll agree to it if I (and everyone else) can look at the banking records of my political candidates. I'll sit still for something like "Lawful Access" as long as I can also call Irwin Cotler's ISP and get the logs of his internet activity. After all, if he's doing something "subversive" then he shouldn't be the Justice minister, should he? The higher up the food chain people get, the more responsibility they shoulder, then the more maginifying glasses they should be under. The stakeholders of a given situation should be able to monitor the activities of the rulemakers.

I'm being overly dramatic to illustrate a point. The point is this: we are being observed more and more. This tide may be impossible to reverse. It is also increasingly clear that our leadership is rampant with corruption. Wars have been started on based on lies. Funds are misappropriated. Backroom deals abound. If the state can monitor the citizens "for safety's sake" then the citizens must be able to monitor the state for the same reasons.

And then we need to get serious about corruption and have some real world consequences for breaches of the public trust, which I think is one of the highest crimes imaginable.

The sad state today is politicians and financiers can abuse their power, lie, employ the powers of the state for their private gain, and even when caught they get a walk or some token prison sentence and will be pardoned down the road once their fate fades from public memory.

China may not be a free an open society like ours is supposed to be. But over there white collar criminals and corrupt politicians get the same treatment as a common murderer: they are executed.

What kind of signal would it send if Kenneth Lay and Bernie Ebers were hanged? What about next politician who is found to have lied to his constituants with grave consequences?

People who hold office need to be scared to death (literally) of abusing that power. They shouldn't have to be, they're supposed to be there out of a sense of public service, but until that sentiment returns to the land,forget terrorism, we need to get tough on corruption. We need to have a War on Corruption, one that may not end in our lifetimes.

My friend Sieg is back from his vacation in the USA and he laments the sad state of gun ownership in Canada and compares with the States. This is another area where I have mixed feelings and sometimes disagree with him.

Sieg's problem is he gives people too much credit. Although he advocates "outlaw idiots, not guns". We live in a society where you are pretty much rewarded for being docile and stupid and penalized for being smart enough to know better. He also doesn't live in downtown Toronto, like I do.

Here in Toronto it's not unheard of to get your head blown off waiting at a bus stop. There's been between 3 and 5 fatal shootings within a 10 block radius of my apartment in the last month. If there were any more guns around this place would be Beruit, or maybe Fallujah.

Would I feel safer about things if everybody owned a gun? Probably not. It would imply that I trust people to have half a brain in their heads when it came to using them and I don't have that faith in my fellow man. Not when I turn on the evening news.

Of course, on the other hand I see the logic in gun ownership and responsible self-defense. Don't come crying to me if, while breaking into somebody's house they empty a shotgun into your gut, or your face. As we unix geeks like to say "Don't do that then". In my book when you violate somebody else's rights you forfeit your own. It seems almost silly to have to explain that but the point seems lost in civilized society.

There is an unconfirmed anecdote I've seen around (seems almost urban legend-ish to a guy here in Canada) that the Swiss citizenry are all well armed and trained. There is a gun in every household apparently, and they know how to use them. The Swiss haven't been in a war in over 500 years. After 9/11, while the rest of us were hastily giving up our rights and having our shoes x-rayed at airports, the Swiss advised their citizens to begin carrying their bayonets on flights. Any would-be hijackers trying to commandeer a plane with a pair of box-cutters would find themselves confronted by a plane full of bayonet-wielding passengers.

Which approach has more long-term viability?

Alas, if this were true, it illustrates a completely different headspace and culture among the Swiss, far more enlightened and not easily transportable to our instant-gratification addicted and attention span deficient culture. It would probably take 2 to 3 generations of intense, conscious *therapy* on our own collective society to get the maturity level up to a point where that approach would work.

Otherwise all you'll have is what they have in the US (or maybe downtown Toronto). And that clearly isn't working.